Coffee and Curators: Exhibit Development

Thursday, October 13, at 3 p.m. (Eastern)
Zoom registration
IUMAA Exhibits and Education Assistant Sarah Rosenkrans, will walk us through the process of designing a museum exhibit using an upcoming exhibit ("How We Know") as a case study. During this free onlilne 20-minutes talk she'll discuss everything from the joys of brainstorming interactives to the importance of following ADA guidelines to the hardest task of all: choosing a font.

Puerto Rican Identity and Representation in Museum Collections and Exhibitions

Friday, November 4, 10:30 a.m. (Eastern)
For Zoom registration info please contact Institute for Advanced Study at ias@indiana.edu
Museums are spaces of intercultural interpretations, where identities are displayed, reinforced, and/or contested. Issues of these imagined representations are particularly important in civil discourse about history, memory, and responsibility centered on Puerto Rico, which now stands at a crossroads. Dr. Amanda Guzmán, an assistant professor of anthropology at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, will explore how past portrayals as a tropical paradise for tourists or a place to be acted on by outside forces may change as the island’s path is imagined and written by, and for, its people, and discusses possible role museum collections, object assemblages with the potential to recover generations of silenced local actors and agency, play in conveying today’s Puerto Rican identities. In what ways can the work of past collectors, frequently outside agents motivated to identify Puerto Rican culture in particular ways for outside audiences, be transformed to document the island and its liminal relationship as an incorporated island territory to the U.S. mainland and convey a sense of identity that feels true to its inhabitants?

Dr. Guzmán received her PhD in Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley and specializes in the field of museum anthropology with a focus on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico at the intersection of issues of intercultural representation and national identity formation.

The program, co-sponsored by Institute for Advanced Study at IU, Themester, and the First Nations Educational & Cultural Center, is free and open to the public.

Ramifications of Identity in, and for, Research Collections: Cases from Biobanks and Museums

Wednesday, November 16, 2:30 p.m. (Eastern)
For Zoom registration info please contact Institute for Advanced Study at ias@indiana.edu
Ethnographic research among Alaska Native people and interactions with museum collections and the Alaska Area Specimen Bank of the Centers for Disease Control's Arctic Investigations program has highlighted connections between human remains, biobanked specimens, and museum objects. This presentation by Jennifer Brown, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alaska- Southeast in Ketchikan, Alaska, will examine parallels between these three categories and ways various actors creatively adopt and resist them.

Museums and biomedical specimen banks (“biobanks”) have in common the preservation of a temporal moment in the life of an individual or group, identifying and representing them in different ways through time and space. In the collections of these medical and museum items there exists tension between the value of identity, as the various items represent the groups and individuals from which they come, and a necessary (or negligent) de-identification as specimens and samples circulate away from the communities in which they originated. What are the ramifications of loss of control over collections, especially as that pertains to maintaining one’s identity and representation (in the case of connection to museum collections) or facing the inability to determine how information central to identity is shared and used (in the case of biomedical specimen banks)?

Speaker Jennifer Brown worked as a tribal health researcher for Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage, Alaska with a focus on the ethics of biobanking research with indigenous populations. Her research focuses on human responses to climate change in Southeast Alaska. She is a member of the Kaigani Haida and the Ketchikan Indian community in Ketchikan, Alaska.

The program, co-sponsored by Institute for Advanced Study at IU, Themester, and the First Nations Educational & Cultural Center, is free and open to the public.