‘Placing’ Europe in the Museum: people(s), places, identities. International Conference

International Conference

as part of the European Museums in an Age of Migrations (MeLA)

European Commission FP7-funded project

Organised by the

International Centre for Cultural & Heritage Studies,

Newcastle University

3-4 September 2012

Call for Papers

The imperatives surrounding the museum representation of place have shifted from the late eighteenth century to today. This is in part because the political significance of place itself has changed and continues to change at all scales, from local, civic, regional to national and supranational. At the same time, recognition of changes in population flows, migration patterns and demographic movement  now underscore both cultural and political practice, be it in the accommodation of ‘diversity’ in cultural and social policy, scholarly explorations of hybridity or in state immigration controls. These issues, taken historically, have particular significance for contemporary understandings of the role of place in individual, collective and state notions of society in the EU, in member states and in other European countries. How do European museums present societies as bound to, or enabled by, place and places? Or as having roots in places and/or taking routes from, to and through places? What cartographical groupings, borders, knowledges (e.g. archaeological, ethnographic etc.) and traversals order and organise populations into societies in the museum? What is the metaphorical ‘place’ of place in European museums now, what does this say about identities?

To invert these questions, we might ask what happens or what can happen, when the ‘peoples’ and ‘places’ implicated in, and at least to some extent constructed in, museum representation shift, change, multiply, fragment and/or move? What happens when the museum desire for fixity is disrupted by new sensibilities towards population flows, multiple heritages and the shifting territories of geopolitical places? Should museums’ representational practices change? If so how? What are the new dimensions of identity construction and production in museums whose physical place is fixed, but whose audiences, with their changing heritages and cultures, are not?

MeLA is an FP7 funded project, information about which can be found at the following link: http://www.mela-project.eu/