Curated Conversations: Evolving Issues of Material Culture
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Join moderator and Associate Director of the MA in Museum Studies program Karina Wizevich as she hosts Art Educator, Writer, and Curator Daniela Fifi and Sociocultural Anthropologist Ruth Toulson for a stimulating conversation about material culture and ever-evolving issues of repatriation and decolonization.
The discussion will include an examination of case studies, ranging from Caribbean and Asian museums to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and examples of digital and physical repatriation to highlight the impact of sharing objects and stories across modalities.
Daniela Fifi, EdD, has worked as an arts educator, writer, and an art curator in galleries and museums in the United States and the Caribbean. She is a doctoral graduate in Art and Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and holds a BFA from Pratt Institute, New York, and an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies from the University of Manchester, UK. Fifi’s research interests are primarily on inclusive art museum programing, with a particular focus on examining museums’ foundational ideological frameworks to formulate collections and programing. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for ViewFinder: Reflecting on Museum Education E-Journal, and has also served on the editorial board of Art Education the official journal of the National Art Education Association. She was formerly the Managing Editor of Small Axe Visualities: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, a project of the Small Axe Journal (Duke University Press).
Ruth E. Toulson, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist whose research in the funeral industry in Southeast Asia and Mainland China focuses on troubling material culture, particularly the dead body whether in museum collections or exhumed from a grave. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she trained at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. She is the author of Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore, co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Death (forthcoming, University of Cambridge Press) and editor, with Zahra Newby, of The Materiality of Mourning: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives (Routledge 2018).
Learn more about JHU’s MA in Museum Studies program.