Making museum professionals: Transnational forces: 11 June 2024, Berlin, Technische Universität

Making Museum Professionals: An International Network:

The Making Museum Professionals network brings together researchers and practitioners to identify, critique and reframe the processes by which museum professionals are made. We do this from historical and contemporary perspectives to address structural inequalities in museum practice. Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, we have held two workshops so far: workshop 1 on Museum Work: Hierarchies and Barriers, Exclusion and Inclusion, and workshop 2 on Navigating Museum Careers: Pathways, Training and Communities, 1850-Now.

The network is now pleased to announce, and cordially invite you to our third workshop, which will will focus on transnational forces and their effects on shaping museum professions and professionals.

Workshop: Transnational Forces

The significance of museums as “contact zones” between geographies and cultures has long been recognised, and Savoy and Meyer’s 2014 The Museum is Open showed how influential the transnational transfer of expertise could be. That volume argued that the museum was and is “a popular European export item”. Our workshop aims to investigate this further while also encouraging focus on the ways in which transnational forces have not just circulated out from Europe, but have operated in the other direction or outside Europe altogether – decentring Eurocentric museologies. In this workshop we intend to develop these foundations by:

• examining the transnational forces that have impacted on museum professionals, including colonialism, ‘development’ and war, their effects and legacies
• considering professionals’ mobility (willing or unwilling), the mechanisms of mobility, and their networks of patronage and influence
• investigating organisations and networks for transnational training and development, e.g International Council of Museums
• uncovering the mechanisms that have and do produce movement of expertise, new ideas and knowledge around the world
• asking how ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ on a global scale were and are constructed and contested through transnational forces

The first part of Workshop 3 was hosted by Fordham University, US, and took place online (for more information, see here). All are welcome to join us at the second part of the workshop, an in-person day at Technische Universität Berlin on June 11. Please register in advance via this ticket source link:

Programme

9.00 (Berlin Time) Registration

9.15 Meike Hopp, Berlin University Alliance (BUA), Museums and Society – Mapping the Social and Technische Universität Berlin: Welcome

Andrea Meyer, Technische Universität Berlin: Introduction

  The Forces of Transnational Practice (2)

Chair: Claire Wintle, University of Brighton

 9.30 Nushelle de Silva, Fordham University, New York City: Transnational Forces: Summary of first part of panel from online event

 9.45 Pablo von Frankenberg, Berlin: Exchange and Interchangeability: Museum Professionals and the Shape of a Global Institution

 10.00 Iñigo Salto Santamaría, Technische Universität Berlin: Edith A. Standen (1905-1998): Art Secretary, Monuments Woman, Curator

10.15 Sudeshna Guha, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi: Archaeology and Museum Careers in India: Colonialism and Nationalism

10.30 Roundtable Discussion

11-11.15 Coffee break

11.15 Calixte Biah, Musée d’Histoire de Ouidah, Benin, and Bénédicte Savoy, Technische Universität Berlin: The Impact of Restitution on a Museum Curator: Calixte Biah in conversation with Bénédicte Savoy

12.00 Lunch (not provided)

 Museum Networks and Transnational Practice

Chair: Kate Hill, University of Lincoln

 1.00 Matilde Cartolari, University of Vienna: The Power of Loans: Museums and exhibition diplomacy in the interwar period

 1.15 Lou Jacquemet, University of Geneva and Technische Universität Berlin: UNESCO and ICOM in the Professionalization of Museum Personnel in 1960’s-70’s Africa

 1.30 Shreya Gupta, University of Exeter and Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: The Role of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in Facilitating Research on Indian Objects

1.45 Susan Kamel, University of Applied Sciences Berlin: The SAWA and the MuseumsLab from a Power-critical Decolonial Perspective: Lessons Learned

2.00  Discussion 

2.15 Coffee Break

 The Tools of Transnational Practice

Chair: Tamsin Russell, Museums Association, UK

 2.45 Johanna Zetterström-Sharp, University College London: Nigeria and the Evolution of Money: An international loan between National Museum Lagos and the Horniman Museum in 1979

 3.00 Nushelle de Silva, Fordham University, New York: Paper Professionalization: The Getty Conservation Institute Training Manuals and Their Networks of Knowledge

3.15 Kate Hill, University of Lincoln: Curators on Tour: Grants and Mobility Schemes in the UK, 1930-1960

3.30 Roundtable

 4.00 Coffee Break

 4.30-5.30 Next Steps, Discussion – Chair: Kate Hill and Claire Wintle

Venue

Technische Universität Berlin

Hardenbergstr. 16-18, HBS 005

10623 Berlin

The workshop is hosted by the chair of modern art history, Technische Universität Berlin. It is co-organised by Kate Hill, Andrea Meyer, Tamsin Russell, Nushelle de Silva and Claire Wintle, with support from the University of Brighton’s Centre for Design History. Partner of the event is the research project Museums and society. Mapping the social.

The flyer for the event can be found here: