CONFERENCE:
Museum policies in Europe between 1990 and 2010: Negotiating political and professional utopia
Oslo 27-29 June 2012
This conference presents an arena in which academics, museum managers and cultural politicians get the chance to meet and debate a matter deeply important to everybody concerned with cultural identity uses in a late modern and postmodern society, and more specifically to those studying the future role and responsibilities of national museum institutions in this regard.
Image: Protestors outside the National Museum in Oslo. Photo André Gali.
Central questions being discussed are: how is the role of national museums conceived in a Europe realizing the impact of globalization and mass human migration? How is cohesiveness built and change negotiated through the implementation of museum policies? Are the voices of old and new minorities heard and taken into account? In which ways is the present and future role of national museums discussed in media and public debates?
It is likely that national museum policies and debates on such policies have developed differently around Europe, thus Eunamus researchers present findings from five different countries: Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary and Norway as well as from the European Union (EU). The aim is to establish some main perspectives on the development in Europe during the past 20 years. The short temporal dimension is chosen to capture the processes of policy development, particularly around the end of the Cold War and the enlargement of the EU. It will also respond to the social implications of expansion and redefinition, both in old and new European nations, and map the European response to global issues of asylum and mass migration reflected in national museums.
Besides presentations of research findings, the conference includes a panel debate with invited speakers and commentators.
This is your chance to negotiate political and professional utopia with prominent actors on the European museum political field in 2012!
There is no conference fee, but all participants (except invited speakers) must take care of accommodation and travel themselves.
For participation, contact Lill Eilertsen preferably within the 1th of June on the following e-mail address: lill.eilertsen@ikos.uio.no
We expect the conference to be fully booked.
Click here to read more about the case studies.
Invited speakers
EuNaMus Contributors:
Felicity Bodenstein (Université Paris-Sorbonne), Alexandra Bounia (University of the Aegean), Lill Eilertsen (University of Oslo), Gabor Elbi (Central European University, Budapest), Maria Höglund (Linköping University), Kristin Kutma (University of Tartu).
Some of the guest speakers:
Professor Dr. Stephan Krankenhagen (Hildesheim University) has explored the correlation between collecting policies and the musealisation of Europe in NTNU’s research project “Exhibiting Europe: The development of European narratives in museums, collections and exhibitions”. Krankenhagen is interested in the general movement that seeks to redefine the prospects and qualities of objects and collections for the twenty-first century, and holds that Europeanisation is one possibility. He is also associated with the MeLa project.
Clelia Pozzi is Research Fellow at Politecnico di Milano, one of the most outstanding European universities in Engineering, Architecture and Industrial Design. At this conference she represents MeLa (European Museums in an age of migrations), another interdisciplinary European research programme funded by FP7th.
Professor Rane Willerslev, since 2011 Director of the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. Willerslev’s career ranges from curatorial activities to adventurous anthropological research, and he is a dedicated member of the Adventurer club of Denmark. Now he is challenged by political and professional disputes following the planned moving of three ancient Viking ships to a new museum building.
Jon Birger Østby is former Director of the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority, and has followed the process from planning to establishment of official museum and archive standards in a country in which governmental influence on the museum field is particularly strong. He is now working as volunteer in a cross-institutional project on digitaliation of museum items (Norwegian Folk Museum/KulturIT/Art Council Norway).
Dr. Ian McShane (Swinburne University of Technology) has a background as curator, heritage consultant and public sector manager (the National Museum of Australia) and holds a degree on local government community infrastructure. He was involved in Migration Memories, a research project about exhibitions of Australian migration histories from local and personal perspectives.
