CALL FOR PAPERS
Curated session: Infrastructures and future possibilities for participation
We are looking for four more papers to join our curated session on ‘Infrastructures and future possibilities for participation’ for the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS), which will be held at University College London from 26 to 30 August in 2020. We hope to create a conversation about infrastructural elements - strategies, decision making processes, collections management, audience engagement, technologies used and interoperability, funding streams - that support, inhibit and/or sustain participation with cultural heritage in museums. We want to discuss how they work, why they work like they do and what could/should be different when thinking about the future of engaging with cultural heritage. We want to hear your perspectives and ideas about different types of materialities in museums, interactions you are interested in, focusing on what people do, how, with whom, facilitated by what, and how things are connected. This non-representational approach (Thrift, 2008) may be helpful to understand the complex assemblages and help us to see which infrastructures are in place and how they do or do not work.
The session organisers are Susanne Boersma (University of Hamburg and Museum Europäischer Kulturen Berlin), Cassandra Kist (University of Glasgow), Quoc-Tan Tran (University of Hamburg) and Inge Zwart (University of Uppsala). These early stage researchers are all part of POEM - an H2020 EU-funded project on participatory memory practices - about which more information can be found on the website: www.poem-horizon.eu.
Papers accepted to date discuss social media strategies, deaccessioning policies, participatory practices contributing to museum collections, and professional practices in participatory projects. Please consider joining our curated session if you are interested in talking about participation, infrastructures, and the future of the museum. Interested early-stage researchers from different fields and disciplines are invited to submit an abstract of a maximum of 250 words to [log in to unmask] by October 10th, 2019.
Abstract:
This curated session discusses future and current infrastructures in museums that facilitate participatory practices. Here, the frame of ‘infrastructures’ opens up an opportunity to talk across a myriad of academic disciplines to critically analyse the complex infrastructural assemblages of museums and how they affect or sustain opportunities for participation. Dimensions of infrastructures are understood as relations between technical, social and informational entities that extensively shape (future) actions and practices (Star and Ruhleder, 1996; Bowker et al., 2010; Dindler, 2014; Huvila, 2019). The session explores differences between anticipated and actual uses of infrastructures by museum practitioners, institutions, and audiences, and suggests how these infrastructures might shape participatory practices in the future. By examining museums’ structural organisation and defining their role(s), strategies and practices relating to participation, this session seeks to explore questions such as: Are there different infrastructural regimes under which we see and name things differently? How do (digital) infrastructures support or inhibit participation? Can failures and disruptions of existing infrastructures be anticipated and if so, what are the take-aways in terms of resilience and maintenance? Strategy and policy documents, as well as exhibiting, collecting and social media practices form the empirical basis. Potential approaches and outcomes as well as possible pitfalls are identified with ‘infrastructures’ as the main analytical lens. Highlighting how connectivities between museums, audiences and ‘communities’ are shaped, fostered or inhibited, the session reflects on participation in relation to organised practices and their socially inclusive potentials.
References
Bowker, G. C., Baker, K., Millerand, F., & Ribes, D. (2010). Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment. In J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, & M. Allen (Eds.), International Handbook of Internet Research (97-117). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
Dindler, C. (2014). Designing infrastructures for creative engagement. Digital Creativity, 25(3), 212–223.
Huvila, I. (2019). Learning to work between information infrastructures. Information Research, 24(2), paper 819. Retrieved from http://informationr.net/ir/24-2/paper819.html
Star, S.L. & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps towards an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. Information Systems Research, 7, 111–133.
Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. London & New York: Routledge.
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Quoc-Tan Tran
POEM Research Fellow
University of Hamburg
Institute of European Ethnology/Cultural Anthropology
Grindelallee 46, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
https://www.poem-horizon.eu<https://www.poem-horizon.eu/people/quoc-tan-tran/>
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