Posted on

New issue UMACJ: Pedagogy Hub

University collections and museums are increasingly used for teaching. The latest issue of the University Museums and Collections Journal (Vol. 13, No. 2), edited by Alistair Kwan and Andrew Simpson, brings together essays from all over the world on the roles of university collections for state of the art pedagogy. 

As Alistair Kwan writes in the issue: “As this collection of essays shows, there are important things for university museums and collections—as hubs—to contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning, and to the steering of our universities into exercising their sociocultural, epistemic and economic privileges more critically, more wisely, more ethically, more influentially over the coming century of widely anticipated struggle.”

Access the issue here.

 

Posted on

Two more issues of UMACJ in Chinese

A complete volume of UMACJ — volume 12, comprising 2 issues — has been translated into Chinese and is now accessible.

The translation is a result of the ongoing collaboration between UMAC and the University of Shanghai Museum. 

Please read UMACJ Chinese version here.

 

Posted on

New IMAGINATIONS videos published

Learn more about the daily lives and aspirations of young museum professionals around the world.

Zhao Ke, Co-Chair of UMAC Futures and Director of the Museum of Electronic Science, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, CHINA, has released three more videos of the series IMAGINATIONS:

  • Holly Millward, Australia
  • Mohamadou Moustapha Dieye, Senegal
  • Rebeca Bombonato, Brazil

The videos can be seen in UMAC YouTube channel. Here is a shortcut.

Posted on

RELEASE: UMAC GUIDANCE ON RESTITUTION

After extensive and in-depth open debate, UMAC is releasing the final version of the document UMAC Guidance for Restitution and Return of Items from University Museums and Collections.

The document is the outcome of the project UMAC-ER: The Ethics of Restitution and Repatriation (2020-2021), chaired by Vice-Chair Steph Scholten (The Hungarian, University of Glasgow, UK), supported by ICOM and involving partners such as ICOM’s Committee for Professional Ethics (ETHCOM), ICOM Committee for Collections and Museums of Ethnography (ICME), ICOM Australia and UNIVERSEUM.

The document can be accessed here.

 

 

 

Posted on

Update on UMAC 2022 Prague

Dear UMAC community,

This year, our annual conference will happen in August, in Prague, Czech Republic, included in the 26th ICOM General Conference.

This year’s ICOM General Conference will be a hybrid conference, in other words you will be able to register to attend in person or remotely. As always, registrations will be handled centrally by ICOM and should open soon.

As for UMAC 21st Annual Conference, it will be shorter than usual and have two parts:

PART 1 – 22-23 August: we will have a joint meeting with colleagues from three other ICOM committees: NATHIST (natural history museums), ICME (ethnography museums) and ICR (regional museums)

A Call for Papers for this is opening now.

PART 2 – 25 August: UMAC will meet separately at the Faculty of Sciences of Charles University (Hrdlicka Museum)

UMAC will give a limited number of grants to help cover travel and accommodation costs of members traveling to Prague. Please make sure you’re eligible.

You can find all the information about UMAC 2022 here: http://umac.icom.museum/activities/conferences/

We’re excited with our conference this year and we look forward to meeting you in Prague.

Warm regards,

Marta Lourenço, University of Lisbon

UMAC Chair

PS As mentioned earlier, this year’s Annual General Meeting will not happen in Prague. It will be 19th September, online.

Posted on

New volume: Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS

Communication, Cultural Heritage, and Digital Strategies: University museums and collections

 
 
University museums and collections as repositories with heritage value and didactic and investigative vocation raise many questions and a diversity of approaches, both in theoretical foundations and in the strategies used for its conservation, exploitation, or public dissemination. For this reason, it is essential to develop an open mind that promotes the multidisciplinary integration of the different areas of knowledge and that coordinates work about the scientific, technical, and educational heritage produced or to be produced in the context of the institutions of higher education with shared values of respect for cultural heritage and service to society (Owen et al., 2016; Simpson, 2019).
 
 
Deadline: 28 February 2022.
 
Coordinated by Francisco Javier Frutos-Esteban and Valeriano Piñeiro-Naval, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain.
 
Posted on

IMAGINATIONS: The Voice of Young Professionals

We are delighted to introduce UMAC FUTURES’ latest project IMAGINATIONS, a series of online conversations in our YouTube channel moderated by Zhao Ke, co-chair of UMAC Futures and Director of the Museum of Electronic Science at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

The series opens with five episodes featuring professionals from the Czech Republic, UK, Serbia, Argentina and Japan.

Read more.

 

Posted on

New thematic issue UMACJ

Call for proposals for a thematic issue of University Museums and Collections Journal UMACJ

UMAC, ICOM’s International Committee for university museums and collections, through 2020 and 2021 have undertaken an “Ethics of Repatriation and Restitution” study in partnership with other ICOM groups (ETHCOM, ICME and ICOM Australia), and with UNIVERSEUM, the European network of university museums. This project was part of ICOM’s commitment to research and address issues of decolonization. The project involved considerable international dialogue and exchange between university museums and source communities. It resulted in a draft set of guidelines designed to assist universities on the issue of restitution and repatriation and augment the ICOM Code of Ethics.

The project uncovered many interesting examples of repatriation from the higher education sector as part of university decolonisation strategies. We are now seeking to capture these for a thematic edition of the University Museums and Collections Journal. Given that the issue of repatriation will dominate the coming generation or two of museum practice, we believe it is important to capture the details of some of the initial repatriation efforts from universities. Universities must address the issue of heritage tainted with histories of violence, forceful occupation, oppression, exploitation, unethical research, and war.  Most importantly, we must go beyond university museums, deep into our departments, laboratories and institutes, which are full of items embodying uncomfortable truths.

We are seeking two different types of papers with this call:

  1. Papers that discuss and scope the changes in universities and university museums currently underway and frame these within the theoretical contexts of either museology, education, sociology, cultural studies or organisation and institution theory, or some combination of these.
  2. Case studies of your university repatriation experience in the form of a proposal (under 1000 words) for a full article. Aspects that should/could be included are:-
  • What was the nature of material repatriated?
  • How and why did it initially become part of the university?
  • Were you approached by source communities seeking material, or did you seek out source communities, or work with third parties?
  • Why was it the right time to repatriate material?
  • Did the repatriation provide learning, teaching and research opportunities? Will these be ongoing after the repatriation?
  • Was there any resistance to the repatriation?
  • Did the university (and university museum/collection) change as a result of the repatriation, including relationships with staff, students, alumni? If so, how?

For the case studies we prefer papers that are jointly authored by university practitioners and people from or representing source communities.

We are seeking both papers that either comply with or challenge the set of guidelines as currently expressed. You can find the guidelines here.

This thematic issue of UMACJ represents an opportunity to both develop a discourse around the changing paradigms of knowledge generation in higher education, and document some specific instances on the cusp of what is likely to be a generational change in our knowledge-based organisations as universities and their museums are transformed from being fixed points of cultural authority to fluid networks of cultural agency.

Proposals due: 31 December 2021.

Send proposal to umacjeditor@gmail.com

Publication: aiming for late 2022 or early 2023

This special issue will be edited by: Steph Scholten (The Hunterian, University of Glasgow), Jilda Andrews (Australian National University), Nicole Crawford (University of Wyoming), Andrew Simpson (Macquarie University).

Posted on

Colonized Objects and Bodies in Europe

Colonized Objects and Bodies in Europe

New challenges and new perspectives on the De-colonialization of Cultural Heritage 

CALL FOR PAPERS

  • Organizer: Coimbra Group, Working groups Heritage and Development Cooperation; Jeremy Upton (Edinburgh), Giuliana Tomasella (Padova), Julien Bobineau (Würzburg) 
  • Format: conference at the University of Würzburg (Germany) 
  • Date: 24th and 25th of June 2022 

In both the ex-colonial and the ex-colonized worlds, visions of Africa and its colonial past have become incarcerated in stereotypes, dichotomies, and historical misrepresentation. Especially in European Cultural Heritage, we see a mixture of these ambivalent subjects and habits of lack of self-searching. But the restitution debate in Europe on cultural objects from Africa (Sarr/Savoy 2018) and the Black Lives Matter movement, which also reached Europe in 2020, have set the course for a questioning of the colonial essence of Cultural Heritage. Recent questions about history politics, cultural memory and cultural traditions are now also – and above all – debated in public. Museums, Cultural Heritage institutions, Universities with their collections and their self-image are now more than ever in the spotlight of the dynamics of a global debate. In the course of the conference, we aim to discuss the following questions: 

– How can Cultural Heritage be decolonized in science, society, politics, and institutions to avoid ideological extremism? 

– Are there national differences and similarities in Europe? 

– Who are the actors and networks involved in defending the status quo or in decolo-nizing Cultural Heritage? 

– What are the direct and indirect consequences of unreflect and stereotypical Cultural Heritage in Europe? 

– How can the ‘decolonialization of Cultural Heritage’ contribute to the field of devel-opment cooperation with the African continent? 

The conference will be organized within four sessions: 

1. Historical misrepresentation: The concealment of colonial history in Cultural Heritage 

2. The survival of Stereotypes: Reflections on the Imaginary within Cultural Heritage 

3. University’s collection: Current states and new approaches 

4. European Museums: Restitutions and new displays 

The conference is organised under the umbrella of the Coimbra Group, an association of long-established European multidisciplinary universities of high international standard. 

 Abstracts of max. 300 words and a short bio of max. 200 words should be sent to julien.bobineau(at)uni-wuerzburg and giuliana.tomasella(at)unipd.it by 30 September 2021.