Seminar Series 2023-24

Thursday 1 February 2024: Shelby Navone (School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester) and Jenna Hall (Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), Monash University) Virtual Vessels and Tangible Touch: Slow Engagement in the Digital Era. What unfolds when one pauses to slowly engage all senses with material objects in both physical and virtual realms?

2023/24 School of Museum Studies Seminars (Semester 1)

Wednesday 11 October (1.00pm - 2.00pm), Collections Room/MS Teams: Dr Magdalena Buchczyk (School of Museum Studies British Academy Visiting Fellow, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) ‘Weaving knowledge in and out of the museum’

This seminar presentation focuses on a Berlin-based collection to explore the contributions of weaving knowledge to museum studies. Inspired by Haraway's notion of the cat's cradle, it argues for the potential of entangled, textural knowledge in rethinking the museum.

Wednesday 1 November (1.00pm - 2.00pm), Collections Room/MS Teams: Dr Ammar Azzouz (British Academy Research Fellow, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford) discusses his new book Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Bloomsbury). Dr Ammar Azzouz on Domicide

Wednesday 15 November (1.00pm - 2.00pm), Collections Room/MS Teams: Lucrezia Gigante (School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester), ‘Place-based Public Programmes: A Model for Cultural Citizenship in Art Organisations’

Wednesday 29 November (1.00pm - 2.00pm), Room ED AD13, Ground Floor, Education Seminar Room/MS Teams: Tara Munroe (CEO, Opal22) in conversation with Dr Stacy Boldrick (School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester) on curating Casta: The Origin of Caste, an exhibition about race and class in the paintings of Juan Rodríguez Juárez (1675-1728) at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery (16 September-3 December 2023). Tara Munroe on Caste: The Casta Paintings

Wednesday 13 December (1.00pm - 2.00pm), Room ED AD13, Ground Floor, Education Seminar Room/MS Teams: Fabiana Dicuonzo (Visiting Postgraduate Research Fellow, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester and Gilbert Eastaugh study grant, CITCEM - University of Porto), ‘Museums as Meeting Places: Learning from Educational Spaces’

The seminar will present research conducted by architect Fabiana Dicuonzo in the framework of her PhD in Museology at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto. The research explores the educational potential of museum architecture, looking at the study, design, and spatial layout of liminal spaces in museums and schools and their role as meeting places.

Semester 2

Weds 6 March (13.00-14.00): Collections Room and online: Robert Bevan (Director, Authentic Futures) on his book Monumental Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth about the Past (Verso). 
 
Weds 13 March (13.00-14.00): Collections Room and online: Uthra Rajgopal (Independent Curator) on Curating the 2023 British Textile Biennial Fragments of Time.

Weds 17 April (13.00-14.00): Collections Room and online: Elizabeth Gray (School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester), ‘An Invitation to Play: Embodied Interpretation in the Museum’.

This seminar explores the question of how museums can interpret the history of performing arts in a way that evokes the embodied experiences of performers. The presentation discusses an interpretation intervention piloted at Pickford's House Museum to highlight the practicalities of implementing playful, movement-based interpretation into museum contexts, and considers the potential implications that findings from the accompanying visitor research may have for the development of an interpretation framework for performing arts history.

Weds 24 April (13.00-14.00): Collections Room and online: Esther Peeren (Professor of Cultural Analysis and Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam), ‘Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World: Beyond the Global Village’.

Until recently, the main focus of academic and public debates about globalization was on the urban environments containing, since 2007, a majority of the world population. The rural’s most conspicuous appearance in early globalization theory came in the form of media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that ‘the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village’. In the first part of this lecture, I explore how the notion of the global village was much more than a mere metaphor, being derived from the British colonial strategy of villagization implemented in Kenya. The reality of the global village – as a social form prompted not by new electronic technologies but by the longstanding global reach of capitalism and colonialism – is further explored in the second part of the lecture by looking at Daisy Hildyard’s 2022 novel Emergency, in which a woman living through the Covid-pandemic in a city remembers her childhood in a Yorkshire village, and Vron Ware’s 2022 history and memoir Return of a Native: Learning from the Land, which traces land ownership and uses in the part of Hampshire where she grew up from the 18th to the 21st century.

Weds 15 May (13.00-14.00): Collections Room and online: Catalina Imizcoz (School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester), ‘Working with Companions: The Exhibitionary Form of the Present-Future’. 

My research weaves together examples drawn from Chile, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK and the US, where the exhibitionary form is in some way different to the Western, modern one, because the reality-settings they operate on are divergent. They are studied through the stories of the people who worked in producing or examining them – who I call my companions – in conversations that centre around mind-maps that locate the points or nodes where those projects intersect with my research. In order to create knowledge jointly, we exercise improvisation, rely on speculative thinking and use tentacular exploration. We are trying to arrive together at outlining what these examples contribute to the present-future of the exhibitionary form.

Weds 22 May (13.00-14.00): [Room to be confirmed]: Holly Bee (School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester), ‘A Fire, a Web, and a Water Cycle: The Emotional World of the Socially Engaged Museum Worker’.

Sharing her staff-focused PhD, Holly will explore the workplace emotional experiences and drives of socially engaged museum practitioners. Privileging empathy in research approaches, the seminar will shed light on workers' daily realities of performing socially engaged practice, and suggest how they can be healthily empowered for a more compassionate and just sector.

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