This event has passed.

Polyphonic Perspectives

07/06/2021

Polyphonic Perspectives: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural materials in Museums and University Collections and global issues of repatriation and restitution.

A combined CAUMAC / UMAC / ICOM Australia webinar with the support of the National Museum of Australia.

Museums and universities are institutions centred on knowledge. As focal points with social, political and cultural authority, museums and universities both generate and transmit knowledge. Museums de-contextualise and re-contextualise objects in their collections. This means they can be both a constrainer and liberator of meaning. Museums have historically mediated meaning and access to meaning around collections and objects. Access to meaning can either challenge or embed paradigms of knowledge. Universities and museums were at the centre of political power when European colonisers spread across the globe. This involved massive displacements of cultural objects, scientific specimens and even human remains. Objects became a part of the trade in Imperial knowledge systems.

Many argue that now is the time for museums and universities to come to terms with this historical legacy. Museums and universities have many collections that are colonial legacies. There are demands from source communities for repatriation and restitution. Furthermore, audiences and students want to know how and why much of that material got there in the first place. There are calls for this reckoning with historical legacies to reshape universities and museums into new types of organisations through decolonization.

This webinar asks the questions (among others):

· Are museums and universities changing to incorporate new knowledge systems?

· Are museums and universities organisations that are capable of polyphony?

· Can these institutions be Indigenised?

· Do attempts to bring in new voices, perspectives and knowledge systems amount to more than tokenism or appropriation, or is real progress being made?