Image used with permission from Rae Hutton, Design by Lauren Bosc THINKING THROUGH THE MUSEUM: DIFFICULT KNOWLEDGE IN PUBLIC

Annual Report SSHRC Partnership Development Grant May 1, 2016 – April 30, 2017 Prepared by Lauren Bosc (Project Coordinator)

RESEARCH TEAM & ASSISTANTS:

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 2016-2017 THINKING THROUGH THE MUSEUM page 2

The Research Team includes:

• Dr. Angela Failler (Project Director, University of )

• Dr. ()

• Dr. Erica Lehrer (Concordia University)

• Dr. Monica Patterson ()

• Lauren Bosc (Project Coordinator, ) The Research Assistants/Staff on this project for the reporting period include:

• Michelle K. Barron (MA student, Carleton University)

• Sylvia Dreaver (Dueck) (BA Hons. student, University of Winnipeg)

• Alexandra Nahwegahbow (PhD student, Carleton University)

• Amy Prouty (MA student, Carleton University)

• Travis Wysote (PhD student, Concordia University)

• DJ Fraser (PhD student, Concordia University)

• Trisha Booth (BA student, Concordia University)

• Myriam Gerber (PhD student, Concordia University)

• Noor Bhangu (MA student, University of Winnipeg)

• Lex Milton (CaPSL Staff, Concordia University)

• Mab Coates-Davies (BA student, Concordia University)

• Lindsay LeBlanc (MA student, Concordia University)

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PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES:

Research Meetings/Workshops

Tools and Technologies for Critical Museology (Montréal, September 17- 18, 2016) This workshop represents the 3rd meeting of the Thinking through the Museum research team and their collaborators, exploring the potentials of new media technologies and tools to support the goals of a critical museology. These goals may be loosely defined as an approach to museum theory and practice that reflects on its own authority, collecting practices, and display styles, as well as one that works to “represent both hard truths and community understandings of their own histories” (Amy Lonetree). We sought to engage critically but also creatively with the burgeoning domains of “digital humanities,” new media technologies, and open-source ideology, in pursuit of answers to our project’s key questions. To this end, approximately 30 participants gathered on Saturday, September 17, 2016 to hear from four main speakers and discuss how digital tools and technology affect and are affected by museums.

The workshop also included a walking tour with the Museum of Jewish Montreal based on the “Work Upon Arrival (WUA)” virtual tour (http://imjm.ca/work) on September 18 where participants walked in downtown Montréal and explored oral histories with digital and live storytelling techniques.

Re-Thinking the Museum through Collaboration and Community-Based Curatorial Practices (Halifax, April 24-26, 2017) This two-and-a-half day invitational workshop brings together scholars, artists, curators, and museum professionals to discuss how collaboration and community-based curatorial practices might help us re- think the capacity for museums to grapple with “difficult knowledge.” The workshop raised questions such as: How might collaboration and community-based curatorial practices be uniquely suited to working through difficult knowledge? What might museums and their publics gain from engaging difficult knowledge through collaboration and community-based exhibitions?

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Halifax, Nova Scotia, located on unceded Mi’kmaq territory, provides us a unique opportunity to explore these issues. In the most practical terms, the purpose of this workshop is fourfold: (1) to connect with local researchers, artists, curators and museum professionals in the Halifax area; (2) to learn from museums and exhibits that utilize collaborations and community-based curatorial practices; (3) to discuss strategies and tools for collaborating with museums and communities on difficult knowledge; and (4) to explore possibilities for future research partnerships. The workshop included meetings with participants from across Halifax, as well as from Winnipeg, Montréal, Chicago, and Maine, a visit to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, the Africville Museum, and a walking tour titled “Walking the Debris Field: Public Geographies of the Halifax Explosion at Turtle Grove.”

For more information, see: http://thinkingthroughthemuseum.org/workshops/collaboration-and- community-based-curatorial-practices-2017/

Skype Meetings During this reporting period, research team members engaged in four PDG specific skype videoconference meetings (May 4, 2016; August 9, 2017; November 16, 2016; March 27, 2017). The purpose of these meetings was to discuss the ongoing partnership activities and projects, as well as plan for upcoming research meetings and workshops.

Museum/Gallery Site Visits

Manitoba Museum On July 19, 2016, Dr. Angela Failler, RA Sylvia Dreaver, and Project Coordinator Lauren Bosc visited the Museum. Along with a museum ethnography sheet, the visit allowed us to think through how indigenous content is presented.

This visit will also be the foundation for a blog written by Dreaver to be posted on the project’s website in the coming months.

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Jewish Montreal Walking Tour Workshop participants joined guide and Founding Research Director of the Museum of Jewish Montreal Stephanie Tara Schwartz on the “Work Upon Arrival (WUA)” tour, which was first developed as a digital walking tour by the Museum of Jewish Montreal in 2014 based on oral histories collected in the 1970s by Seemah Berson in her book I Have a Story to Tell You. The tour was later reinterpreted as the Museum’s first pop up exhibit Parkley Clothes: 1937. Stephanie Schwartz guided participants on the physical version of this tour developed for Jane’s Walks. En route, participants tested a variety of interpretive tools used in the digital and physical version of the tour. In addition, given the historical and contemporary presence of Indigenous people on the terrain traversed by the tour, participants were invited to discuss, among other questions: how can the story of early 20th c. Jewish immigrants productively intersect with Indigenous stories past and present?

For more information, see: http://thinkingthroughthemuseum.org/workshops/tools-and- technologies/mjm-walking-tour/

Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 As a part of our Halifax Workshop (April 24-26, 2017), we visited the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 as the final national museum visit with this grant (Canadian Museum for Human Rights, 2015; Canadian Museum of History, 2016). Located along the Halifax Harbour at Pier 21, this museum endeavours to share Canadian immigration narratives in historical and contemporary exhibits. This tour allowed our workshop participants to consider how ideas of community and collaboration function in a national museum context, and worked well alongside the keynote from Karine Duhamel (Canadian Museum for Human Rights) at this workshop.

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Africville Museum As a part of our Halifax Workshop (April 24-26, 2017), we visited the Africville Museum to continue our discussions about collaboration and community-based curatorial practices. The museum, which is housed in a replica of the original Africville church that was destroyed by the city in order to make room for industrial development, includes exhibits that invite visitors to walk through the history of Africville, from thriving village on the banks of the Bedford Basin to the dislocation.

Walking the Debris Field: Public Geographies of the Halifax Explosion at Turtle Grove As a final tour with our Halifax Workshop (April 24-26, 2017), we attended this walking tour led by the Narratives in Space and Time Society. The tour led participants along the shore of the Halifax Harbour, where on December 6, 1917, a ship exploded and killed more than 2000 people. The tour’s goal was to make space for the stories of the Mi’kmaq communities that were destroyed and displaced by the explosion, stories which are often invisibilized in the larger narratives surrounding the Halifax Explosion.

For more information, see: http://www.narrativesinspaceandtime.ca/projects/walking-the-debris- field-public-geographies-of-the-halifax-explosion/

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KNOWLEDGE MOBILIZATION:

Publications

Curatorial Dreams Published The Thinking through the Museum team congratulates Dr. Shelley Ruth Butler and Dr. Erica Lehrer for their recently published edited collection, Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions. The collection officially launched, with more than 25 people in attendance, at the ACHS conference (Concordia University) on June 6, 2016 in Montreal, Québec. This collection, which features chapters from team members Erica Lehrer and Monica Patterson, challenges museum critics to propose exhibitions inspired by their research and critical concerns to creatively put theory into practice.

What if museum critics were challenged to envision their own exhibitions? For more information, visit the publisher’s website here: http://www.mqup.ca/curatorial-dreams-products- 9780773546837.php

Curatorial Dreams Reviewed Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions, has been reviewed by Robert Fulford of the National Post. The review, titled “‘Every Exhibition is an Argument’: Scholars Envision Dream Exhibitions that May One Day Exist,” describes the collection as “ground-breaking.”

It can be accessed here: http://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/every-exhibition-is-an- argument-scholars-envision-dream-exhibitions-that-may-one-day-exist/wcm/0c449813-ea20-4ab0- abaa-2cf0d16c2233

The text was also reviewed by and and can be accessed here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-new-work-from- carlyn-zwarenstein-margaret-christakos-and-others/article31386204/

Dr. Erica Lehrer Publishes Review of Poland: Land of Folklore? Published on Krytyka Polityczna & European Alternatives, Dr. Lehrer recently published a short set of observations on the newly opened exhibit Poland: Land of Folklore? at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. She notes “The compelling, beautifully installed exhibit showcases the Communist- era “branding” of Poland. It presents the country as a modern yet deep-rooted land, with a colorful

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vision of a united, tradition-inspired, forward-looking Polish peoplehood.” But, ultimately “[t]he recently opened Poland: Land of Folklore? exhibition in Warsaw repeats ongoing silences in today's Polish museum practice.”

The full review can be viewed here: http://politicalcritique.org/long-read/2016/curating-polish- folk/

Ethnography Prompt Sheets

Over the course of the past year, we’ve added to multiple “Ethnography Prompt Sheets” to the tools available on our website. The prompt sheets, adapted for different museum and gallery visits, ask questions intended to provide visitors with guidance and suggested lines of inquiry into curated spaces. The prompt sheets can be available here: http://thinkingthroughthemuseum.org/tools/museum-ethnography-prompt-sheets/

Pedagogical Tools

As our newest tool for knowledge mobilization, the research team continues to assemble tools for teaching. As of April 30, 2017, we have three course assignments listed on our website, that can be accessed here: http://thinkingthroughthemuseum.org/tools/pedagogy/

Museum Statements Archive

Led by Erica Lehrer and Research Assistant Jordana Starkman, the partnership project has gathered a number of political and social public statements released by museums and galleries across the world. The purpose of this archive is to consider the ways museums can be leaders in drawing attention to pressing social issues. The archive, available on the project website (http://thinkingthroughthemuseum.org/resources-archives/statement-archive/), features statements on: • Black Lives Matter • Canadian Truth and Reconciliation • Syrian Refugees • President Trump • Counter-Inauguration Actions • US Refugee Policy • The Québec Mosque Shooting • The J20 General Strike • Jedwabne Pogrom • The Orlando Shooting The statements have been released from:

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• American Association for State and Local History • Art Museum Teaching • Association of Midwest Museums • Canadian Museums Association • The Incluseum • McCord Museum • Museum 2.0 • Museum Questions: Reflections on Museums, Programs, and Visitors • New England Museum Association • Radio Canada International • Royal Ontario Museum • Salaam Cultural Museum • Smithsonian Magazine • Textile Museum of Canada • United States Holocaust Memorial Museum • Virginia Holocaust Museum • Museum of Modern Art • Whitney Museum of American Art • The Davis Museum • Montreal Holocaust Museum • Queens Museums • Contemporary Jewish Museum

Research Assistant Blogs

There are currently six blog posts, mainly from the project’s Research Assistants. - “Museum Openings” – Angela Failler and Erica Lehrer - “A Wrench in the Medicine Wheel: The Price of Stolen Water for Indigenous Cultural Continuity” – Anna Huard - “Workshop Reflections: Stephanie Tara Schwartz on Decolonizing Curatorial Pedagogies” – Stephanie Tara Schwartz - “Recollected Memories: Forgotten – The Métis Residential School Experience” – Sylvia Dreaver - “On Love, Dialogue, and Decolonization: A Research Assistant’s Reflection on Decolonizing Curatorial Pedagogies” – Alex Nahwegahbow - “Ways of Walking Against-the-Grain: Decolonizing Curatorial Pedagogies” – Michelle K. Barron There are also at least three additional blog posts pending.

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Website and Social Media Development

thinkingthroughthemuseum.org

The project’s website, thinkingthroughthemuseum.org, was purchased on June 17, 2015. Since then, the website has been populated with 49 permanent content pages, 36 separate posts, and has received 7 comments on various pages/posts. The permanent pages include information on the project’s partners, research team, research assistants, workshops, tools (such as museum ethnography sheets and hashtags), resources/archives (including the museum statements archive, relevant links, and a scholarly reading list), and a contact page.

The posts on the website feature information such as news stories, time-sensitive events, op-eds, blog posts, and “SnapThoughts.” The website’s SnapThoughts, which are quick, reflective responses to exhibitions, galleries, and museum spaces from our Research Assistants and Research Team, also invite visitors to contribute their own SnapThought to each post in the comments, encouraging direct engagement with the museum/gallery visits that the research members take.

The website’s “insights” function was engaged on April 30, 2017, and has recorded 479 unique site visits from people in 30 different countries (up from 315 last year), the majority of views coming from The United States, Canada, and Brazil (in that order).

Facebook Page The Thinking through the Museum Facebook page was created on May 4, 2016. As of June 26, 2017, the page has 140 “likes” (up from 52 this time last year). This page posts almost daily, and also receives comments from page visitors and posts from viewers that “tag” the page in their own personal posts. From the page’s insights, we know that some of our posts reach upwards of 500 people with many people clicking on our posts and reacting to them using Facebook’s reaction icons. Our Facebook page has also made some very positive connections, reaching across the world and viewed in more than a dozen languages.

@MuseumThinkers Twitter Account The @MuseumThinkers Twitter account was created on February 12, 2016 and has since tweeted 66 times, mainly during the public workshops. Many of the tweets the account wrote have been retweeted and favourited by those who follow the account. The @MuseumThinkers account also has 56 accounts following it, and 33 accounts that it follows, many of which are interested individuals and organizations.

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The Twitter account has also used a number of hashtags (#) to connect followers to the Thinking through the Museum project, including #museumtoolsandtechh, #communitycollab, and #thinkingthroughthemuseum. All hashtags are also listed on our website so they can be easily accessed for those who are interested (http://thinkingthroughthemuseum.org/tools/hashtags/).

Conferences

ACHS 2016: Thinking through the Museum Roundtable On Tuesday, June 7, 2016, Thinking through the Museumresearch team members Angela Failler, Heather Igloliorte, Erica Lehrer, and Monica Patterson were joined by colleagues Shelley Ruth Butler and Jennifer C. Robinson for a roundtable discussion at the Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference in Montreal, Québec, Canada.

The discussion focused on the conference’s theme and asked the question: what might the heritage of difficult knowledge change, if productively curated? Participants discussed topics including (but not limited to): slow museology and conflict; game methodologies to address victim competition; children and difficult knowledge; counter-museums and social justice, failed politics of recognition, museum leadership and structure, and indigenous curatorial practice and settler colonialism. While the Canadian Museum of Human Rights was a central focus, particularly in relation to the Partnership Development Grant from SSHRC, participants also drew on their broad field of engagement, including museums in Poland, South Africa, northern Canada, the United States, and Germany.

TTTM Research Team speaks at International Conference in Poland Thinking through the Museum research team members and collaborators closed the momentus “Museums and their Publics at Sites of Conflicted History” international conference in Warsaw, Poland (March 13-15, 2017). The conference explored the role of museums in negotiating new public histories in societies in transition; of special interest was how the historical narratives constructed in museums help to shape new social relations in a dynamically changing present. [more on next page]

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Drs. Angela Failler, Heather Igloliorte, Erica Lehrer, and Monica Patterson participated in the conference’s many roundtable and panel discussions, finishing with a panel of their own titled “Thinking through the Museum: Difficult Knowledge in Public.” This panel also invited collaborators Dr. Shelley Ruth Butler (McGill University), Hanna Radziejowska (Warsaw Uprising Museum, the Dom Spotkan z Historia [“House of Meetings with History”], Museum of the City of Warsaw), Magdalena Zych (Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum), and Aleksandra Janus (Jagiellonian University).

The presentation is available for viewing on the conference’s website here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLeNpTTm1-s

Features

SakKijâjuk Exhibition featured with 20th biennial Inuit Studies Conference Thinking through the Museum team member Dr. Heather Igloliorte’s curated exhibit, SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut, has been featured in an interview style by the Memorial University of Newfoundland in anticipation of its grand opening in St. John’s, Newfoundland in October 2017. The exhibit, opening at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, will also coincide with the 20th biennial Inuit Studies Conference.

For more information, please see the original feature on the conference website: (http://www.mun.ca/isc2016/whatsnew_exhibition.htm)

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Dr. Monica Patterson Featured in Institute of African Studies Newsletter

The Thinking through the Museum team congratulates team member Dr. Monica Patterson for being featured in the Institute of African Studies’ newsletter. Interviewed by African Studies graduate student Kristine Harwood in a piece titled “Monica Patterson: Curating a new methodology in African Studies,” Patterson makes clear she “seeks to create a new and hybrid methodology, one that works towards reinserting historical materials into communities, questions the colonial legacies of knowledge production about ‘Africa’, and creates space for the histories and memories of marginalized groups” (4).

To read the full feature, download the newsletter here: http://thinkingthroughthemuseum.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/Winter-2016-Africa-Newsletter.pdf

Dr. Angela Failler co-launches Museum Queeries at the University of Winnipeg

Thinking Through the Museum has helped germinate a new project called Museum Queeries, co-led by Dr. Angela Failler with Dr. Heather Milne (UWinnipeg). This project prioritizes Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and queer, (2S+LGBTTQ) contributions and interventions into museums and museum studies both as a means of addressing structural exclusions and opening new modes of productive inquiry and activism.

The idea of “queerying” the museum in this case is not only about addressing the museum’s representation of gender and sexuality; it is also about challenging normative formations including white privilege, racism and settler colonialism, among other systems of oppression, as they operate alongside and with transphobia and homophobia. In other words, the project uses an intersectional approach to think through ways in which gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, religion, ethnicity, and national identities are inter-implicated in the museum and in museumgoers’ points of contact with the museum. It is particularly interested in how queering, decolonizing and anti-racist strategies might work together to bring about change to museum cultures.

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Awards and Notable Distinctions

Angela Failler awarded Dr. Angela Failler, Director of the Thinking through the Museum partnership development project, has been appointed as a new Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Culture and Public Memory — an award valued at $500,000 over five years. Her CRC research will focus on how practices of culture and public memory are used to grapple with the difficult knowledge of historical traumas and their after- effects. She is specifically interested in the potential for these practices to advance reconciliation, redress, and decolonized forms of relating. Failler’s research pays particular attention to memorials, museums, commemorative artworks, community- based practices of remembrance, and government sponsored memory projects. She uses collaborative approaches combining the expertise of scholars, educators, artists, and curators to develop cultural studies in public.

Dr. Heather Igloliorte wins EVA Critical Eye Award Congratulations to research team member Dr. Heather Igloliorte who, on May 13, 2016, was awarded the Excellence in Visual Arts (EVA) Critical Eye Award at the 11th Annual EVA Awards in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

The award, presented by Visual Artists Newfoundland & Labrador (VANL-CARFAC), recognizes the impact that critical art writing can have on a visual artists’ career. Any writer worldwide who has written about a NL artist in any recognized print or online publication during the past calendar year is eligible for consideration.

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NEXT STEPS:

Future Grant Planning Year 3 of this PDG grant will involve a summer school at Concordia University, and future grant planning in the fall of 2017.

Final Thoughts on Year 2, from Project Director Angela Failler:

“Year 2 of this project saw our research team further develop a workshop methodology to foster meaningful connections between scholars, artists, activists, curators, and students. We continue to provide training opportunities to Research Assistants and other highly qualified personnel. The caliber of researchers we’ve attracted to our project has exceeded our expectations. And while the focus of the project thus far has been a scan of museums in Canada, we’ve also begun to internationalize our research network in anticipation of full scale research-based partnerships.”