The GREEN LINES Institute for Sustainable Development is proud to announce the official support of the Portuguese Ministry of the Culture to Heritage 2008: an International Conference on World Heritage & Sustainable Development.

Invited Key-Note Speakers:

Professor Frank Matero, Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA;
Professor Tomislav Sola, Univ. of Zagreb, Croatia;
Professor Gregory Ashworth, Univ. of Groningen, The Netherlands.

To make this event a great success, the Organizing Committee would like to invite all researchers and academics interested in this field of knowledge, to present a paper at this International Conference in Portugal from 7 to 9 May.

Relevant information on this event is available at the conference's website:
or, if you need any additional information contact the conference secretariat by e.mail:

DEADLINE FOR PAPERS' SUBMISSION 15 FEBRUARY 2008

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Michael Atkins, MA Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester

Despite police ‘crackdowns’ and the increasing availability of willing sexual partners online, the canal remains popular with men seeking anonymous and impersonal encounters with other men. During my fieldwork I employed a combination of ethnographic voyeurism and online ethnography to gain an insight into this capricious and difficult to access group. Sketch enabled me to place the witnessed body into a photograph of the empty site, avoiding the ethical, legal and practical complications of recording participants’ identities during ‘the act’. The downside of the technique was that ultimately the other becomes my creation in the collages. However this feels a more honest representation of my experiences and the men’s objectification of each other when cruising.

Participants create cruising grounds in environments most able to accommodate, perpetuate and protect their ambiguity. The cruiser negotiates the encounter with their body; its language and location. To function as a cruising ground a site must enable men to see each other, yet provide shelter for the sexual act from the social gaze. Cruising is an art of bodily and architectural recognition, every movement; placement, used condom and architectural feature contribute to its negotiation. I wanted to show how darkness, obstruction, ambiguous physical performance and scene selection contain the sexual act in a semi-physical yet imagined private space. When social discourse is undesirable, desire must be communicated by the body and its choice of location.

The exclusion of the other’s and my voice from the social exchange made conventional procedures and permissions difficult and in some cases impossible. Although particularly pronounced in my research, I believe this is a dilemma in most anthropological study. Social research always involves an element of deception (Mitchell 1993), even where consent forms can be obtained and research agendas explained, it is naive to assume the participant can appreciate the range of potential implications of being involved.

Despite explanation of my research to many participants, I am unavoidably involved in the embodied communication exchange before permission can be obtained from the potential informant. The anthropologist’s body is part of the social world being studied, as such they are afforded information and access that the status of social player grants. Anthropological dialogue is arguably made possible through the investment of the other in us as part of their social world.

References
Afonso, A, I (2004). New Graphics for old Stories: representation of local memories through drawings. in Pink, Kurti & Alfonso (eds) Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. London:Routedge

Lenza, M (2004). Controversies surrounding Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade: An Unsettling example of politics and power in methodological critiques. In International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol 24 No3,4,5 pp. 20-31

Mitchell, R (1993). Secrecy and Fieldwork. Newbury Park: Sage

Warwick, D,P (1973). Tea Room Trade: Means and Ends in Social Research. The Hastings centre Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1. pp. 27-38

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Good article about the demise of statues of famous despots by David Cannadine...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7196530.stm

Statues to the mighty are erected as permanent monuments. But those regarded as heroes by one political regime are often denounced as villains by the next, their statues left unloved or toppled and carted off to the wilderness.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to From the news

Call for Papers

The Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference,
July 9-11, 2008, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, invites conference papers of up to 4000 words broadly related to the topic of Power and Place.

Image: Megan Baker, Massey graduate (Institute of Communication Design) 2007

Those who are active in the performing and creative arts, design, and visual and material culture know that the theoretical models and studio practices attached to the disciplines are rich with embedded meanings. They can direct discourses, construct or demolish power frameworks, articulate place and situate culture itself, yet they are often neglected as pathways to scholarly knowledge and an understanding of historical or contemporary life.

Papers and panel proposals are invited for the ANZCA 2008 conference that broaden our critical understanding of how performance, design, the visual and the material operate within, around and between the concepts of 'power and place'. Topics may include, but not be limited to, the investigation of power and/or place in cultural, social, historical or contemporary spaces; the contested sites or new opportunities inherent in e-technology or what constitutes quality assurance in visual communication research. Panel presentations on any issues concerning the role of the disciplines in power and/or place are especially welcomed.

Please contact the stream coordinator to discuss possible topics for papers or panels or if you interested in acting as a reviewer. Early career scholars and post-graduate students are particularly welcome to get in touch.

Stream coordinator: Patricia Thomas p.a.thomas@massey.ac.nz

Papers for refereed stream to: Elspeth Tilley e.tilley@massey.ac.nz
by 15 February 2008

Abstracts (up to 300 words) for non-refereed stream: submit to Nicole Patterson n.v.patterson@massey.ac.nz by 9 June 2008

PLEASE NOTE: Papers and abstracts must be submitted through the
central submissions process. Information on the submission process is available: ANZCA 2008

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Hyun-Jung Oh, MA Material and Visual Culture, UCL

Over the past three decades adult interest in dolls’ houses has been renewed, starting in America and then spreading to Europe, especially Britain. My dissertation examined the relationship between dolls’ houses and elderly women who enjoy them and what this phenomenon says about western culture. Extensive fieldwork based on observations and interviews was carried out in many places where dolls’ houses were found, such as dolls' house fairs, toyshops, museums, a stately home and in particular, internet communities to keep up with the growing tendency for the Internet to be a site for this hobby. A wide range of publications, such as monthly magazines, instruction books, mail-order catalogues and the general history of dolls’ houses and miniatures were analysed.

Originating in the sixteenth century mercantile region of Southern Germany, dolls’ houses flourished in the Netherlands, England and America in line with the development of modern capitalism over four centuries. As well-wrought replicas give aesthetic delight, originally dolls’ houses and miniatures contributed to the Cabinet of Curiosities. In the developmental era of modern capitalism, dolls’ houses and miniatures played a role in satisfying emerging bourgeois desire to show off their contemporary wealth and taste in the form of the replica of real houses and households. In the Victorian period with the discovery of childhood as a category, dolls’ houses were actively utilized as didactic medium for young girls as a preview to their future housewifery.

The contemporary dolls’ house scene is clearly divided into opposite ends of the life-cycle spectrum, that is, aimed at either at young children or at elderly women. While children’s dolls’ houses are provided in a complete set made of sturdy materials with a crude structure and vivid colours, adult version of dolls’ houses are an on-going project of collecting and making exquisite miniature pieces on a particular theme developed by owners’ own creativity. However, if the range of dolls’ houses can be extended to include simulation computer games, then teenage girls could still be said to be enjoying dolls’ houses. The SIMS, arguably the world’s bestselling game, can be seen as a virtual dolls' house that model human figures in their built environments, including houses, neighborhoods, and universities within sets of scenarios. The aim of Will Wright, the creator of the SIMS software was to make “a dolls' house come to life”. Given the Marsall MacLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message”, the comparison between the age groups and media of dolls’ houses is well worth scholarly attention.

Stewart (1993: 68) locates a rise in the production of miniature furniture at the same time that antique furniture is being reproduced in mass and readily available form. Renewed interest in dolls’ house can be seen in the growing social obsession with antiquity and heritage since the 1970s onwards. The geographer Lowenthal (1996: 5) claims such phenomenon to be a “cult of nostalgia” with heritage in Britain a reflection of “nostalgia for imperial self-esteem and other bygone benisons”. The isolation of self from family and even of self from one’s former selves are engendered by the modern aspects of life, such as increasing longevity, family dissolution, the loss of familiar surroundings, quickened obsolescence and a growing fear of technology (Lowenthal 1996: 6). Thus, women in their later life are likely to objectify their memory or imagination of childhood or ancestry, such that Tudor, Victorian or 1940s styles are favoured. Stewart (1993: 69) notes that the miniature is linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history. Mrs D, 74-year-old informant said: “Victorians had so much in their houses so cluttered up. Walls were covered in pictures. So they are quite interesting. There have been a lot of changes. I don’t like to do very modern ones”. Mrs C, 76-year-old widow said: “Not very interested in modern houses. They don’t have the lovely old things old people used to have”. She added: “There is just, when you get old you want something, you’re going back to childhood again, that’s what it is, that’s the real thing.”

Today’s hobbyists show diverse patterns in engaging with dolls’ houses as collectors, makers or players. While some wealthy people are collecting expensive miniature pieces, others are making them by employing their lifetimes’ craft skills memorized in their hands. However, the underlying premise of hobbyists of different categories is the activity of putting together an idyllic residential scene comprising a number of objects. In old-fashioned objects older women feel the warmth of the past, contrary to the coldness of contemporary things. Given most elderly women start dolls’ houses when they finish rearing their children and live apart from them, the warmth of home is well presented in the presence of dolls and objects conjuring up the sense of interactivity. The dolls’ house is a miniaturization of domesticity. Women who have accumulated taste, skills and knowledge on homebuilding can employ their lifetime’s accumulation in the miniaturization of domesticity. As children play with toy cars, toy tea sets according to their body size, some old people who are finding it increasingly difficult to deal physically with the actual sized world possibly satisfy their desire to interact a diminished artefactual world. Mrs D comments on the difference between decorating a real house and a dolls’ house: “SIZE. You don’t have to climb up the ladder. You can do it on the table”. The love of homebuilding is injected into making the miniature house, ‘something that’s not very exerting’.

The fact that dolls’ houses still have strong associations with children’s playthings may hurt women’s pride and joy in their hobby. However, there are huge difference between children’ dolls’ houses and grown-ups. While children’s dolls’ houses are made of sturdy material with crude structure and vivid colours, adult versions of dolls’ houses are exquisite and fragile. Thus, the dealing with miniatures requires great attention to the objects and consequently intensive awareness of their bodily movement, as one informant says: “You have to use tweezers to pick them up, things like that. You close the door, calm down, precision is of the most important thing”. This solitary patience in miniaturizing the world brings peace to fingers and thus souls become bathed in peace (Bachelard 1994: 159). This leads people to lose themselves in an intimate make-believe world offering a therapeutic refuge. Bachelard (Ibid: 161) observes the escapist attribute of the miniature noting that “To have experienced miniatures sincerely detaches me from the surrounding world, and helps me to resist the dissolution of the surrounding atmosphere”. Ageing is often accompanied by the sadness of human destiny, including deaths and illnesses. So older people regain a sense of control over the world of objects which are manipulatable and protected from inexorable human destiny. In general terms this research highlights the neglect of the material culture of the elderly, despite their becoming an increasingly important segment of the population.

References
Bachelard, G. (1994), The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press.
Lowenthal, D. (1996), The Heritage Crusade, London: Viking.
Stewart, S. (1993), On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Call for Papers

The 25th annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand [SAHANZ]

Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, 3rd – 6th July 2008

/ between critique and intervention / between analysis and creation /
/ the history of architectural practice / the practice of architectural history / the architecture of historical practice / critiquing the practice of architectural history / gaps:connections:contentions /

Founded in 1984 at a meeting in Adelaide, South Australia, the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) was conceived from the start as a forum for the open discussion of the architectural history and historiography of the region, and as a setting from which to reflect on the status of the architecture, landscape, and cities of Australia and New Zealand in the wider world. While SAHANZ has grown in size and presence, and despite changes taking place in the discipline both locally and internationally, these principles remained constant. In 2008, SAHANZ will hold its 25th annual meeting in the regional city of Geelong, Victoria, Australia, marking a milestone both in the history of the Society and in the organised development of the region’s historiography.

SAHANZ website

Submissions are called for work that address any of these conference themes:

The meaning of cultural significance
• Notions of regeneration or appropriation
• The relationship between age and value
• The notion of history as salvage
• Is preservation an irrational urge?

Determining and contesting urban character
• Definitions of site analysis and design response
• The contentions of intervention
• Multiculturalism and contemporary urban character – the practice of difference
• The relationship between critical heritage and adaptive reuse

Architectural meaning and time
• Design and time – notions of the contemporary and the avant-garde in history
• Time present, time past, time future - A new architecture for a new age?
• Continuity of performance versus persistence of form
• The role of history and historians in training generations of architects

Exchanges between local and global
• Vernacular traditions in the contemporary world
• Flows of ideas, people and cultures in global heritage practice
• Place, taste and tradition
• From Far East to Near North - Australia, Asia and the Pacific
• Is heritage a Western concept?

Modernity, modernisation and regionalism in architectural cultures
• Postcolonialism and architectural culture
• Independence, nationalism and the preferred past
• The contribution of local historiography to international knowledge of arch. history
• What is modern about Modernism today?

The authentic, the salvaged and the invented
• Economic development and heritage – pressures and priorities
• Living heritage – between museums and theme parks
• How does regional history inform architectural historiography?
• Architectural heritage and Tourism

Architecture, heritage and digital culture
• The role of virtual interpretation in heritage places
• Digital interpretation, speculation and creation
• Visions of the past and future in virtual space
• Overlaps of the virtual and the real in architectural culture

Technology, technique and history
• Techniques of preservation
• Why renew? – the useful past
• Growth, weathering, decay and architectural intervention
• The importance of exactitude

Sustainable history/sustainable architecture
• The clarity of history - distinguishing between old and new
• Creating the reality of the past
• Where ecology meets culture – is adaptive reuse sustainable?
• Environmental lessons from historical architecture

Writing architecture
• Relationship of architecture to its history; of buildings to books
• Text as structure, buildings as quotation
• Recreating the course of history
• Historical discourse as an aspect of theory

History as the critique of architecture
• Teaching architectural history and theory
• The nexus between narrative and interpretation
• The architect/critic/client/historian speaks
• Looking back through different lenses – architectural history from other perspectives

Poetry and architecture
• Creative communication
• From the quotidian to the sublime
• Stories of everyday life and architecture
• The sublime ruin revisited

Whose history? Whose heritage?
• Heritage and the multiplicity of the present
• Uncanny heritage – the black armband view of architectural history?
• Indigenous architectures - history/theory/practice
• Architects in history – the noted and ignored

Exchanges between inside and outside
• Icons and iconoclasts – the canon and its discontents
• Alternative architectures - the heritage of outsider architecture
• Subcultures and space – on the street, between the gaps
• Australian vernacular? – suburban building outside the work of architects

Urban morphology and architectural identity
• City patterns past and present
• Multiculturalism and visions of the city
• Questions of origin – where things come from versus where they are
• Finding architectural culture in the suburbs

Architecture and memory – critique and creation
• Methods of historiography in practice
• Constructed identities
• Authenticity and authority in architecture and heritage
• Public heritage/private memories

History and taxonomy
• Canons, categories and practice
• Representation, documentation and intervention
• Critical contextualism
• Exchanges between conservation and architectural design

The ephemeral and the permanent
• Intangible heritage: construct or reality?
• Place, memory and form
• Architecture, heritage and the body
• Space, place, time and cultures

Abstracts of no longer than 300 words are to be submitted in a Microsoft Word document on one page, include a succinct title for the paper.

On another page, indicate your name, institutional affiliation, full contact details and a brief biographic statement (40 words or less), including details of two recent publications.

In the subject line of the email write 'ABSTRACT: paper title'
Name the Word document "yourfamilyname_titleword"

Abstracts must be submitted via the Conference Paper Management web site. Authors will need to create a Login ID and a password to allow secure uploading of your abstract. We recommend that your Login ID does not include your surname. Please also take the time to nominate the conference theme under which you wish your paper to be presented.

Abstracts can be submitted through this link: SAHANZ 2008

Final papers due Mon 25 Feb 2008

Notification of Referees’ reports Mon 31 Mar 2008

Revised papers due Mon 5 May 2008

Conference begins Thu 3 July 2008

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University College London / Kings College London seminar series supported by ESRC

The Social History of the Prototype: seminar one in a series of four

Date: 11th February 2008; 1:30-6pm
Venue: Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street (North-Eastern Corner of Gordon Square), London WC1E 6BT

The seminar will examine the social history of the prototype in order to draw out the differences represented by present innovations in materials, technology and manufacture and explore the earlier 18th and 19th century origins and contexts of development underlying current innovations.

Speakers
Susan Mossmann (Science Museum)
Monika Wagner (History of Art, Hamburg University)
Chris Tuck (Engineering, Loughborough University)
Tim Hunkin (Engineer, Cartoonist and Writer)
Jane Prophet (Artist)

For registration details, and dates / venues / details of other seminars in the series
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/conferences/newmaterialsnewtechnologies/

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The Museology Student Committee for Professional Development at the University of Washington is pleased to open the Call for Submissions:

Transforming Museums: Bridging Theory and Practice
An Interdisciplinary Academic Conference at the University of Washington
May 15-16, 2008

Museums are institutions steeped in tradition but surrounded by constant change. "Transforming Museums" seeks to find ways that professionals can meet these changes deliberately and thoughtfully instead of being swept along their currents. Building on the overwhelming success of last year's "Rethinking Museums" conference, we now turn to the task of "Transforming Museums." Come join us in the green and beautiful city of Seattle as we reach, share, and dreamstorm toward the future of these most beloved institutions. With its unique host of changing museums, both new and old, we can't think of a better place!

Transforming Museums
We invite museum professionals, students, and university faculty to submit paper abstracts or workshop proposals that explore these questions:

How do we transform museums?
Who is leading these transformations?
What recent and current work shares this aim?
How do we define transformation?
Why are these transformations taking place?
Are there discernible patterns in this change?

Bridging Theory and Practice
Throughout the field, museums are transformed as professionals cross bridges between their institutions and education, technology, media, communities, academic disciplines--the possibilities are endless. What are the connections that inform your work and how will they shape the future of museums?

All submissions that invite us to think critically about the work of museums are welcome.

Guidelines:
Submit a paper abstract or workshop proposal
Submissions deadline is January 4, 2008
Abstracts should be 150-250 words

Because museology is inherently crossdisciplinary, research from related disciplines within the social sciences or humanities is welcome.

Please visit our website for submission details and deadlines:
http://www.transformingmuseums.org

If you have questions, please contact the Submissions Committee at museum@u.washington.edu

Transforming Museums is Sponsored by the UW Museology Graduate Program

A printable pdf version with images is available on our website:
http://depts.washington.edu/museum/2008callforsubmissions/callpdffinal.pdf

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Haidy Geismar, NYU

I thought I would write a brief note about the class that I have just finished teaching this semester, which drew on the methods and practices of museum work and material culture studies to extend the intellectual practice of NYU graduate students not just within the university, but outwards within New York City.

Entitled “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes of Value with the New York Department of Sanitation”,the class drew together Museum Studies students alongside students from the Draper Program (an interdisciplinary MA program at NYU) and was Co-taught between myself and Robin Nagle, Director of the Draper Program and Anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation.

The class worked closely with the DSNY and with NYU Faculty Technology Services and had a number of guest speakers from DSNY artist in residence Mierel Laderman Ukeles talking about work with the department as a contemporary artist and social activist to Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett describing the formation of the new Museum of Polish Jews in Poland. The aim of the class was to develop a series of materials drawn from archival and contemporary research into the history and importance of the DSNY that would provide a blueprint for the formation of a DSNY museum.

In class we looked at the history of the DSNY, the cultural landscape of waste that has underpinned the development of NYC, the ways in which material culture passes through different registers of meaning and value within this context explicitly through the lens of working to establish a prototype for a future DSNY museum. Unlike the other public services of Police, Fire and Transit Authorities in NYC, the DSNY does not have its own museum. Its archive lies in a series of mouldy cardboard boxes, its artifactual history is scattered in the form of personal possessions and a few odd bits and pieces saved around DSNY facilities. Part of this lack of reification is due to the negative values associated with the job – DSNY workers, San Men, are valued by the public in relation to the material that they work with – being called “Garbage men” is also internalised by many of the people on the job who refer to their own work as a rubbish job. The class project therefore drew on the dual nature of collections based research to a). preserve and represent complicated histories and labour practices in material form and b) to use object based research as a strategy to influence the ways in which ideas around these concepts were formed and c) to use the idea of a new museum for the DSNY as a starting point for social activism – to not only teach the public more about the job, about waste management and the cultural landscape of trash, but to publicly integrate the DSNY into the fabric of the city in a representational as well as practical way. This work should not need to be done, as we depend more on a daily basis upon Sanitation workers than on almost any other public service. However it became glaringly apparent that there was a real need for the DSNY to have some kind of institutional and representational space, and to have a series of valued collections of historical and contemporary material that could contribute to this shift in valuation.

Image from our archive (http://archive.nyu.edu). The archive is currently password protected but will be made open shortly. Here however you can see the digital repository that NYU has been developing.

As a class, over the course of this semester we have created a digital archive, working with the digital repository structure being developed for faculty use at NYU. Students mined archival material culled from the DSNY, scanned it and catalogued it. We developed collaboratively a series of key words and discussed how we should frame this material. Students also interviewed members from across different divisions of the DSNY and uploaded their oral histories to the same archive. They conducted their own ethnographic research into the contemporary landscape of garbage in the city, attending Freegan tours of the city, documenting litter in their neighbourhoods and keeping diaries of mongo – the things left on the street for hungry scavengers to recycle.

The 'Garbage Mark' left on the street even once the garbage has been collected - permanently marking the city. Photograph taken by Casey Lynn as part of an assignment to do a contemporary ethnography of trash in NYC.

The archive was based on DSpace, an open source database programmed in Dublin core, but not specifically designed for museums. Alongside this formal archive, we ran a class weblog which we used as a commentary on our work in class. Collectively we used the blog to devise key word lists that we then incorporated into the archive, we shared media clips, articles, and have created a rich subsidiary repository of popular culture, our own research and writing and discussion. The blog is a less formal digital space that reflects the sociality of the class. For instance, the blog we also developed a looser framework of tagging which the archive did not permit, to open up our more formal list of key words. We used the blog to discuss issues of copyright and fair use, and to talk about the limitations of the different fields in the archive on how we were framing and presenting our newly created digital objects. Between these two digital forums we have created a rich resource of commentary surrounding a newly formed collection that we hope that the DSNY will carry forward and use as a prototype catalogue for its new museum in the future.

In this way, both blog and archive were tools in the imagination of what a museum both is and could be.

Finally we drew back from both blog and archive to create an exhibition which opened on Wednesday 12 December to resounding success. Held at the DSNY's Derelict Vehicles Office (they are the people responsible for all the abandoned cars and wrecks in the city) we scavenged objects to recreate an old-school style locker rooms, we took objects from the basement of the DSNY headquarters and from people's offices, displayed our archive and the archival collections, created a cd from the oral histories we had been discussing and had a soundscape evoking the gathering of trash in the city. We will continue in another exhibition venue at NYU next year.

Installing the 'locker room' using lockers already in the DSNY space

DSNY pipers at the opening

Commissioner Doherty speaking at the opening

The class after everyone left!
the class has used the tools of conventional museum collection, preservation and research to interrogate the framework in which the DSNY has been conventionally understood and to develop a voice for the department which we hope will resonate both internally and throughout the city. It was rewarding for all of us to see the Commissioner of Sanitation respond so emotionally to the opening of the exhibition (he first worked out of the office in which the exhibition was held) and to hear representatives from the pipe and drum band play. It was obvious that this project has achieved a level of recognition for the issues that the Department faces and extended our practice outside of the conventional boundaries of museum and university walls (see press coverage below):

http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/A_museum_for_city_sanitation/11066.html

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/garbage-in-museum-out/?ex=1198213200&en=1a34c86fab799fe1&ei=5070&emc=eta1

WE would love to hear from anyone who has used this kind of investigation into materiality as a key tool in teaching...

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to From the editors | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses