What role does the contemporary museum play in shaping collective and cultural memories? The concept of the ‘museum’ is transforming with decolonizing campaigns, the participatory museum manifesto, new museology, media technologies expanding the museum beyond its physical walls, and other recent developments. These new approaches challenge traditional ideas of the museum, established in the nineteenth century, particularly in regards to the museum’s relationship to narrative, power, temporality, spatiality, materiality, and history and memory. Today, visitors can be empowered as co-curators, and museums exist in online-only formats or can be embedded within the sites to which they refer with the use of digital mapping software. Furthermore, museum professionals are becoming more sensitive to the colonial histories embedded in normative practices and experimenting with radical techniques to dismantle these. And whereas history used to be the dominant organizing trope in museums, today memory often supplants history as the framework through which museums address and represent the past.
The MSA Museums and Memory Working Group welcomes members interested in the relationship between the two titular fields. We encourage academics, curators, archivists, technologists, activists and other stakeholders working in relevant areas to join the group. We hope that it will develop to not only provide fruitful intellectual discussion but to create a productive space across museum practice, academia and activism through which we can create meaningful collaborations that break down perceived boundaries between theory and practice, and that might impact the transnational development of museums to produce and circulate memory.
CO-CHAIRS
Amy Sodaro is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/City University of New York. Her research focuses on memoralization of atrocity, particularly in memorial museums. She has written chapters and articles on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Jewish Museum Berlin, the House of Terror in Hungary, the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile, and the 9/11 Museum. She is co-editor of Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (2010) and Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights (2019) and author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (2018). Her current project examines new US museums that focus on slavery and its legacies.
Victoria Grace Walden is a teaching fellow at the University of Sussex. Her research specialisms are Holocaust and genocide non-fiction and animated films, digital memory in museums, and film-philosophy. Her most recent book Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory was released earlier this year. She is currently developing an e-book edited collection and online platform entitled The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age. She has worked for the Holocaust Educational Trust, the IHRA, and volunteered for the Wiener Library and Jewish Museum, London.