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Call for Papers: Thinking in Public: Community & Cultural Institutions in Post-National Civic Space, at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Brown University, March 15-16, 2012 (to be confirmed)
Calling scholars, practitioners, artists, public historians, and public humanists engaged in the representation or study of contemporary public culture! Thinking in Public is a two-day colloquium designed to bring together a diverse array of intellectual and professional perspectives around the topic of reconfiguring power relationships in “traditional” Western public cultural forms: the museum, library, and archive; the tour and travel narrative; archaeological practice; and monuments and sites of recollection and history-making. These forms have undergone vast changes in the last half century, especially as digital practices have increasingly come to shape public culture. Culture professionals have sought to decentralize triumphalist national histories, reveal sources of alienation and oppression, suggest multiple perspectives, and expose the methodological dispositions guiding those who tell the histories of objects, individuals, and cultures.
This colloquium explores the cutting edge of new practices that are remaking the old forms. What are the gains of “indigenous curation”? What are the merits and costs of “new tourism”—be it environmental tours, guerilla tours, or “slum” tours? Where is nationalism still present, and does it serve expected ends? What other avenues can we envision for turning cultural mechanisms of power to new ends? What is the future of the cultural sector?
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Post-national public narratives
• Museum work for social justice
• “New” tourism
• Digital humanities, digital initiatives and public culture
• Collective memory and political resistance
• Curatorial or other tactics for practitioners in the cultural sector
• Predictions for the cultural sector
• Work plans, case studies or reports on new projects that inspire
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to thinkinginpublic@gmail.com by October 1, 2011. Accepted panelists will be notified by November 15, 2011. Final copies of papers are to be submitted to our digital forum by February 1st, 2012. Any questions may be directed to Elena Gonzales (Elena_Gonzales@brown.edu), Amy Johnson (Amy_Johnson@brown.edu), or Robyn Schroeder (Robyn_Schroeder@brown.edu). Thank you for your interest in thinking in public with us!
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