Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.
Professor Li Ruru: The Cultural Revolution and Me
Tuesday, May 1, 5-7PM Lecture Theatre, China Centre, St Hugh’s College, Oxford
Open and free of charge for all
Supported by: Oxford Chinese Studies Society
2016 witnessed the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. BBC Chinese invited Professor Li Ruru to write about her own life during that time. Having considered the invitation for a long time, Li finally wrote, from a point of view why she decided to teach a module at Leeds: ‘The Post-Cultural Revolution Literature.’ Based on the BBC article, the talk tells stories about her own experience and people’s lives around her. It also attempts to tease out what the Cultural Revolution meant to the young people at that time and what impact it has had on her generation, a large group of teenagers.
The English translation of the article is available at:
Why I teach ‘Post-Cultural Revolution Chinese Literature’ at a British university by Li Ruru, Translated by Thomas Markham
This event will be of interest to those of you who work on Chinese history, Chinese literature, politics, and education. Professor Li’s talk will last around 40 minutes and we will leave plenty of time for critical dialogues, Q & A and discussions.
About the speaker
Li Ruru is Professor of Chinese Theatre Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, UK. She has written extensively on Shakespeare performance in China (including a monograph Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (2003)) and on Chinese theatre (modern/traditional). Her recent work includes Staging China: New Theatres in the Twenty-First Century (ed. 2016), The Soul of Beijing Opera: Theatrical Creativity and Continuity in the Changing World (2010), Translucent Jade: Li Yuru on Stage and in Life ([in Chinese] 2nd edition 2015), and a photographic exhibition Cao Yu (1910-1996): Pioneer of Modern Chinese Drama (2011-16). Li runs traditional song-dance theatre workshops for both students and theatre professionals because she regards regular contact with the theatre as essential to her academic work.
https://www.facebook.com/events/367687450399248/?ti=icl
Book Launch with Author & Translator: Yan Ge (顏歌)’s The Chilli Bean Paste Clan, translated by Nicky Harman
https://www.facebook.com/events/605485149803274/
2018/May/07 Monday 5-7PM Ho Tim Seminar Room, China Centre, St Hugh’s College, Oxford
Open and free of charge for all
Supported by: Oxford Chinese Studies Society
To welcome everyone back to Oxford in this Trinity Term, we have invited one of the most important writers of China’s post-1980 generation, Yan Ge, to share with us her experiences as a young writer in China and abroad. She will bring her seminal work, The Chilli Bean Paste Clan (《我們家》in Chinese, published in 2013), and discuss issues of family, language, morality, capitalism and more, with the novel’s English translator Nicky Harman. The Chilli Bean Paste Clan the English translation will be published by Balestier Press and available on the market from the 1st of May, 2018, adding a fresh voice in the growing field of literature in translation.
Synopsis of The Chilli Bean Paste Clan:
Set in a fictional town in West China, this is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the lucrative chilli bean paste factory, and their formidable matriarch. As Gran’s eightieth birthday approaches, her middle-aged children get together to make preparations. Family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling rivalries flare up with renewed vigour. As Shengqiang struggles unsuccessfully to juggle the demands of his mistress and his wife, the biggest surprises of all come from Gran herself……
Professor David Der-wei Wang 王德威 of Harvard University has commented on Yan Ge and her work and hinted that she might signal a generational shift in the Chinese literary scene:
“She writes about her hometown. The stories in a small Sichuanese town are greatly done. She has her own worldviews, and frankly speaking, she is of a very fortunate generation. What she may have encountered as she grew up is not as tumultuous or adventurous as the writers that came before her, and therefore the factor of imagination has gradually come to matter more than experiences in reality.
她写她的故乡，四川一个小城的故事，写得很好。她有她的世界观，但坦白地讲，他们都是有幸的一代，在她成长的过程里面，她所遭遇的不如过去那辈作家有那么多的坎坷或者冒险性，所以，想象的成分已经逐渐地凌驾了现实经验的体会。”
This event will be of interest to those of you who work on contemporary China, Chinese literature, translation studies, and publishing. The conversation between Yan Ge and Nicky Harman will last around 30 minutes and we will leave plenty of time for critical dialogues, Q & A and discussions.
Books available for purchase at a discounted rate.
Speaker biography:
Yan Ge was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1984. She is a writer as well as a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. Publishing since 1994, she is the author of eleven books in Chinese. Her works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Hungarian. She was a visiting scholar at Duke University from 2011 to 2012 and a residency writer at the Cross Border Festival in Netherlands in November 2012. Named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China, she is now the chairperson of China Young Writers’ Association and a contract writer of Sichuan Writers’ Association. She recently started writing in English. Her English stories could be seen on Irish Times and Stand Magazine. She lives in Dublin with her husband and son.
Nicky Harman is a British translator of Chinese literature, and one of the most influential figures in the field. She is co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors) and co-founded Paper Republic 纸托邦, one of the most important online forums for Chinese literatures in translation. She taught on the MSc in Translation at Imperial College until 2011 and now translates full-time from Chinese. The authors she has translated include Jia Pingwa贾平凹，Yan Geling 严歌苓，Chan Koon-chung 陈冠中，Annibaobei 安妮宝贝，Chen Xiwo陈希我，Yan Ge颜歌，and Han Dong韩东, to name just a few. She has won several awards with her translations.
How do we define a sound or a taste for which our language does not have a dedicated word?
Typically, we borrow words from another sensory modality. Wines, for example, are often described by words that belong to other sensory perceptions: a “soft flavour” borrows the adjective soft from the domain of touch, and a “round taste” borrows the adjective round from the domain of sight.
It remains an interesting open issue to what extent these cross-sensory metaphors are universal across languages, and to what extent they are language-specific.
Dr Francesca Strik Lievers will address these questions and provide an overview of the latest scientific discoveries in the field, using examples taken from different languages. Her talk will be followed by an opportunity for questions.
The event is organised and hosted by Creative Multilingualism in collaboration with TORCH. Creative Multilingualism is a research programme led by the University of Oxford and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Open World Research Initiative.
Participation is free and open to the public. We provide FREE LUNCH to all participants.
12.30-13.00 – lunch and mingling
13.00-14.00 – talk and discussion
The Hall will be open from 19.15 for refreshments, help and comouter advice for family history searches, new books to browse, cd’s to browse.
阴道之道l 牛津·女权话剧
Our Vaginas, Ourselves l Chinese Vagina Monologues at Oxford
The play will be performed in Chinese with English subtitles.
The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written by Eve Ensler based on interviews with more than 200 women from different social-cultural backgrounds. Ensler wrote the piece to “celebrate the vagina”.
In 1996, The Vagina Monologues premiered at HERE Arts Center, Off-Off-Broadway in New York, and it was awarded the Obie Award for ‘Best New Play’ that same year. Ensler’s play has since been translated to more than 40 languages, and performed on the stages of over 140 countries.
In 2012, a drama-focused group, BCome, inspired by the Vagina Monologues, created an original episodic play, Our Vagina, Ourselves, based on interviews with Chinese women. The play is around an hour and a half in length, and the scripts .draw from interviews as well as the personal experiences and opinions that BCome members have on social issues.
In Our Vagina, Ourselves, women are not treated as victims, but as active subjects who have autonomy and agency. It therefore proposes an alternative reading of gender violence and integrates anger and grief with joy, satire and humour. It also challenges the marginalization of “the others” and brings forward the rights of LGBTs, and it cares deeply about intersectionality, especially among gender, sexuality and class.
On March 20, 2018, Our Vagina, Ourselves was performed in the lecture theatre of SOAS by a group of performers consisting mainly of oversea Chinese students.
On June 12, 2018, it will be performed again at Oxford!
See you then, when we will tell you all about Our Vaginas, Ourselves.
Organizing bodies：VaChina, OCSS (Oxford Chinese Studies Society), and BPCS (British Postgraduate Network for Chinese Studies)
Acting Crew: VaChina
VaChina, established in September 2017, is a UK-based Chinese feminist network officially registered at SOAS with members from various higher education institutions including in SOAS，LSE，Oxford，Cambridge，UCL，UAL, and Essex. VaChina aims to create a supportive and friendly environment for all gender and sexualities, advocates for justice within the field of gender, and promotes gender equality via different means, including theatre.
Scripts ：BCome
Founded in 2012, BCome is a feminist group based in Beijing. Led by the youth, the BCome group initiates campaigns for women’s rights and against gender-based violences.
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/358499304639795/
Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/our-vagina-ourselves-at-oxford-tickets-45627591354?aff=efbeventtix
Humans have been creating figurative art for at least 40,000 years. Professor Gillian Morriss-Kay, Chairman of the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, will present ideas about the evolutionary changes in perception that led to the origin and flowering of this aspect of human behaviour and will consider its practical significance.
St Cross Special Ethics Seminar. The standard view in evolutionary anthropology is that human morality originated as an adaptation for solving problems of social living that early humans faced in the Pleistocene. This descriptive claim has been invoked to support the normative thesis of Ethical Pluralism (EP): the view that there is more than one valid morality. The logic is that if the justifiability of a moral system depends on how well it performs certain social functions, and if different human cultural ecologies call for different functional moralities, then at least a moderate version of EP may be true. In this paper, we show that this simple evolutionary defense of EP fails because there is a yawning gap between a morality’s validity and its success in “solving problems of social living,” even if these functional solutions are not tied to effects on reproductive fitness. Although morality originated as an adaptation to solve certain problems of social living, it has since come to encompass features that are not explainable in any functionalist terms. We go on to construct a richer evolutionary argument for EP, one that draws upon two non-adaptive concepts from evolutionary biology: (1) the dynamic of plasticity paired with later rigidity in individual moral development, and (2) path-dependent constraints on the evolution of moral systems in which individual moral development occurs. Taken together, these two phenomena suggest that there is more than one way of flourishing for human beings—and if conduciveness to flourishing or wellbeing is one plausible criterion for evaluating moralities, then it is likely that there is more than one valid morality. Finally, we examine the implications of this discussion for ideal moral theory. We conclude that even if there were only one uniquely valid moral theory, this would still be compatible with EP, given path-dependent constraints on the evolution of moralities.
The Pitt Rivers Museum cares for a sail from an umiak, or women’s boat, collected from an Inuit group in the Hudson Strait in 1824. The sail is unique, in that it is made from strips of dried intestine, sewn together to make a large square sail – it is the only know example in a museum collection. Due to the size of the object and the very fragile material, it is not possible for the object to be on long-term display. Creating a rare opportunity to see this fascinating object, the Conservation team will put the sail on display for several days and will be on hand to talk about this special material and the conservation work carried out. Talks at 11.00, 12.00, 13.00 14.30 & 15.30
A presentation on natural history covering kingfishers, butterflies, insects, and many mammals.
The Preeces have been photographing wildlife for about 18 years after taking early retirement and have had their work published in many magazines.
The esteemed ceramicist Claudia Clare is an artist who uses this traditionally domestic medium to present social commentary, often on issues of trauma, sexuality, and revolution. Having been subjected to censorship by public art institutions, Claudia joins us to speak not only about her work but also about the fight against bureaucracy and institutional politics. www.claudiaclare.co.uk
This talk is part of the FAR (Fine Art Research) Guest Lecture series, supported by the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University. All talks are free to attend, and everyone is welcome to join us. Booking is essential: www.eventbrite.com/e/artists-talk-claudia-clare-subversive-ceramics-tickets-50921796464
Sunday, 25th November 2018
11am – 6.15pm (Registration starts at 10.30am)
Chakrabarti Lecture Theatre & JHB207,
John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Headington Road, Oxford OX3 0BP
“What does it mean to research through creative practice?”
Keynote Speaker: Dr Geof Hill (Birmingham City University)
www.bcu.ac.uk/research/-centres-of-excellence/centre-for-research-in-education/people/geof-hill
To have a look at the schedule and book your ticket, please visit: ars2018.eventbrite.co.uk
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Delegate/Attendance fee: £30 / Early Bird Tickets (£20) are available until 18th November – includes lunch & refreshments
We’ll be posting speaker information leading up to the event so keep an eye out for our Facebook event page: www.facebook.com/events/455606768180452
This event is supported by the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University and the Oxford City Council.
For a digital copy of the event booklet and more information please contact: info@ca-ru.org
We look forward to seeing you there!
CARU Conference Team
Follow us on social media: @CARUpage
Join us as part of St Anne’s Equalities Week in collaboration with Oxford Women in Business for a panel event featuring Anne’s alumni.
Under the banner of “Overcoming Challenges”, we shall discuss how best to navigate the world of work and whether diversity initiatives truly work.
After the panel event, there will be a drinks reception and an opportunity to meet the speakers.
Chief Philologist of the Oxford English Dictionary Edmund Weiner will be presenting his talk, “Thew Grew out of their Name” to the Oxford Tolkien Society
Entry free for members, £2 for non-members
“Many words and names in Tolkien’s words seem to have had a complex inner history in his own mind. This talk will look at how Tolkien’s creative philological mind worked. It will be an unhasty ramble around Ent country, looking at names and topics of language construction and language theory, with even a quick visit to Humpty Dumpty!”
We are delighted to invite to a documentary film-screening of the film Dreamland, followed by a Skype Q&A with one of the film-makers, Professor Britt Kramvig.
The film: Viewed through the camera lens of a philosopher, it is inspired by a line from “Dreamland” by romantic poet Edgar Allan Poe “…by a route obscure and lonely, haunted by ill angels only…” A journey through people-places in Arctic landscapes is made by the figure of a native anthropologist. She follows in the footsteps of many others, recounting experience. Viewers glimpse moments of a sublime, the subject of Poe’s poem. The movie gives form to hopes for futures different than pasts. An essayistic documentary in the form of a twenty-first century Arctic road-movie by professor Britt Kramvig (UiT) and filmmaker Rachel Gomez (Tromsø). Trailer: https://vimeo.com/163989818
The 5th Annual Oxford Business and Poverty Conference will feature a diverse range of speakers addressing the Paradoxes of Prosperity. Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/5th-annual-oxford-business-poverty-conference-tickets-57733957822
Hosted at the Sheldonian Theatre, the conference will feature keynotes by:
Lant Pritchett: RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Government, former Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development
Efosa Ojomo: Global Prosperity Lead and Senior Researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute
John Hoffmire: Director of Center on Business and Poverty and Research Associate at Kellogg Colleges at Center For Mutual and Employee-owned Business at Oxford University
Ananth Pai: Executive Director, Bharath Beedi Works Pvt. Ltd. and Director, Bharath Auto Cars Pvt
Laurel Stanfield: Assistant Professor of Marketing at Bentley College in Massachusetts
Grace Cheng: Greater China’s Country Manager for Russell Reynolds Associates
Madhusudan Jagadish: 2016 Graduate MBA, Said Business School, University of Oxford
Tentative Schedule:
2:15-2:20 Welcome
2:20-2:50 Efosa Ojomo, co-author of The Prosperity Paradox, sets the stage for the need for innovation in development
2:50-3:20 John Hoffmire, Ananth Pai and Mudhusudan Jagadish explain how the Prosperity Paradox can be used in India as a model to create good jobs for poor women
3:20-3:40 Break
3:40-4:10 Laurel Steinfeld speaks to issues of gender, development and business – addressing paradoxes related to prosperity
4:10-4:40 Grace Cheng, speaks about the history of China’s use of disruptive innovations to develop its economy
4:40-5:15 Break
5:15-6 Lant Pritchett talks on Pushing Past Poverty: Paths to Prosperity
6:30-8 Dinner at the Rhodes House – Purchase tickets after signing up for the conference
Sponsors include: Russell Reynolds, Employee Ownership Foundation, Ananth Pai Foundation and others
This public event brings global leaders in ethnographic museums together to consider how to reinvigorate museums with ethnographic collections, foreground indigenous knowledges and curatorial practices, and rethink assumptions about museums.
Participants include: João Pacheco de Oliveira (Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); Joe Horse Capture (Minnesota Historical Society, USA); Damion Thomas (National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution, USA); Wayne Modest (Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands).
Delegate biographies:
Joe Horse Capture (A’aninin, USA): Now Director of Native American Initiatives at the Minnesota Historical Society, Joe was formerly Curator at the National Museum of the American Indian. He consults widely on issues regarding museum representation of Indigenous people in the USA.
https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/horse-capture-native-people-have-a-story-to-tell-their-own-cbrUU5jgNU2keWg71W5B_g/
Wayne Modest (National Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands): His research interests include issues of belonging and displacement; material mobilities; histories of (ethnographic) collecting and exhibitionary practices; difficult/contested heritage (with a special focus on slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism); Caribbean Thought. More recently Modest has been researching and publishing on heritage and citizenship in Europe with special attention for urban life, and on ethnographic museums and questions of redress/repair.
https://www.materialculture.nl/en/about/wayne-modest
João Pacheco de Oliveira (Federal University of and Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): de Oliveira isan anthropologist who works with the Tikuna people of Amazonia. With Indigenous leaders, he was one of the founders of the Maguta Documentation and Research Centre, later the Maguta Museum which is now administered by a local Indigenous group. He is curator of the ethnological collections at the Museu Nacional, which suffered a devastating fire in 2018.
https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-8322.12485
Damion Thomas (Curator of Sports, National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution, USA): Damion explores the role of sport in linking African American people with the American nation as a whole.
https://smithsoniancampaign.org/inyourcity/speaker-damion-thomas.php
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/smithsonian-sports-curator-explains-how-athletes-turn-social-and-political-issues-national-conversations-180970778/
St Peter’s College welcomes you to a talk about Lord Nuffield, a leading figure in St Peter’s early history.
William Morris, Lord Nuffield, probably did more than any other individual to transform Oxford in the twentieth century, physically, economically and socially. His success as an industrialist allowed him to become one of Britain’s most generous benefactors; he gave away the equivalent of £1.5 billion in today’s money, to causes including health, education and academic research. This talk looks specifically at Lord Nuffield’s vital support to various Oxford colleges, including the saving of St Peter’s from closure, andhttps://interestingtalks.in/Oxford/# the founding of the college which bears his name, Nuffield College. It also explores his complex and sometimes difficult relationship with the university.
St Peter’s College Chapel
Free to attend
All welcome
This two-day conference will explore the evolving relationship between conflict and identity, with a specific interest in the role of history education in pre-conflict, at-conflict, and post-conflict societies. It will focus on how teachers and lecturers present history; how such choices shape identity; and how history education can be used for the purposes of promoting or undermining peaceful societies.
Alongside our conference on 19th October, Greene’s Institute will be hosting our first public event: a special interactive keynote with Professor Henrike Lähnemann (University of Oxford). This event promises to be a fantastic exploration of one of the most important acts of translation in European history. All are welcome.
What happens when you excavate the image archives of the Institute of Archaeology and other departments of the University of Oxford? The answer: you find amazing pictures that tell unexpected stories. Most of the pictures are black and white and 70 or more years old. Discover Oxford through a new lens with Janice Kinory to explore the Historic Environment Image Resource Project digital image archive where the images are stored and how you can access them.
Pompeii Rediscovered
A talk with Massimo Osanna, Director General, Parco Archeologico di Pompei
Mon 11 Nov, 6.30–7.30pm
This event will be followed by drinks in the museum and a private view of the Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition.
In 2018, two-hundred and seventy years after excavations at Pompeii began, Director General of Pompeii, Professor Massimo Osanna, launched new excavations for conservation and research. Find out more about the amazing discoveries made in this project – from mysterious mosaics to shrines to the gods and even taverns– and learn what they reveal about daily life in Pompeii.
This event was originally scheduled for 31 October but has been moved to this new date.
Booking is essential. Tickets are £25/£22/£20 Full/Concession/Members
Migration is present at the dawn of human history – the phenomena of hunting and gathering, seeking seasonal pasture and nomadism being as old as human social organisation itself.
The flight from natural disasters, adverse climatic changes, famine, and territorial aggression by other communities or other species were also common occurrences.
But if migration is as old as the hills, why is it now so politically sensitive? Why do migrants leave? Where do they go, in what numbers and for what reasons? Do migrants represent a threat to the social and political order? Are they none-the-less necessary to provide labour, develop their home countries, increase consumer demand and generate wealth? Can migration be stopped? One of Britain’s leading migration scholars, Robin Cohen, will probe these issues in this talk
Please register via the link provided.
This talk will be followed by a book sale, signing and drinks reception, all welcome. Copies available at half price — £10 — to cash buyers only.
Some 45,000 years ago, a group of around 1500 humans who were genetically similar left Africa for Asia. Successive generations of their descendants were the first members of H.sapiens to explore the earth, apart from Australia – the ancestors of today’s indigenous population left Africa around 10,000 years earlier. The talk will discuss how that original group became the genetically diverse mix of peoples who now inhabit our world. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the key evidence on the limitations of our differences today is to be found in the Pitt Rivers Museum.
In this lecture, in honour of Edward Greene, Donald Meek will describe the fascinating process of Gaelic Bible translation in Scotland and Ireland. Beginning with the standard Gaelic Bible, translated between 1767 and 1804, Donald will explain its creation, and its debts to the work of earlier translators and revisers, including the Rev. Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle (who produced ‘Kirk’s Bible in 1690), but pre-eminently to the foundational labours of the translators of the Bible into Classical Gaelic in Ireland in the earlier seventeenth century. Both the principal translators of that period – Bishop William Ó Dómhnaill and Bishop William Bedell – studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where they were trained in biblical languages by the first Master of Emmanuel, Lawrence Chadderton. By way of comparison and contrast, brief reference will be made to the somewhat different histories of Bible translation into Manx and Welsh. The lecture will conclude with some discussion of the profound influence of the Gaelic Bible on the development of modern Scottish Gaelic literature, and its enduring legacy
Hear a whole phD in just three minutes!
Can you understand a whole phD in just three minutes? Perhaps you are an Undergraduate or Masters student who is aiming for a future PhD?
Join Humanities and Social Sciences PhD students as we challenge them to boil down their whole PhD to just three minutes and one slide – in a way that makes sense to everyone!
Speaker: Dr Neil Armstrong (Stipendiary Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Magdalen College)
This paper uses ethnographic material of NHS mental healthcare to raise some questions about autonomy, risk and personal and institutional responsibility.
My research investigates mental health. I am particularly interested in how the institutional setting shapes so much of mental healthcare. My research aims to find ways that we might improve healthcare institutions rather than just focussing on developing new healthcare interventions. I am also concerned with methodological questions: how anthropological work can be of clinical value, and how best to produce anthropological knowledge in an inclusive way.
This year’s Kenneth Kirkwood Memorial Lecture Day focuses on the always fascinating subject of death and last rites in different cultures. The day will consist of four very varied talks from a panel of eminent speakers, and will include a buffet lunch.
The talks are:
The Funeral Pyre: the Archetypal Death Rite from Ancient Greece to India Today, Dr Felix Padel, School of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford
Funeral Options: From Celebration to Ash Delivery, Professor Douglas Davies, Director of The Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University
Accra Coffins: Artefact, Art or Expensive Tourist Tat?, Professor Malcolm McLeod, Professor of African Studies at Glasgow University and former Keeper of Ethnography at the British Museum
Of Vultures, Dogs & Fire: A Zoroastrian End, Shahin Bekhradnia, Religious Affairs Spokesperson for the World Zoroastrian Organisation
Friends and students £25/ non-Friends £35 (Includes buffet lunch).
All the profits from this event will be added to the Kenneth Kirkwood Memorial Fund. The primary purpose of this fund is to support staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum to undertake travel associated with their work.
This is the first in a series of conversations that engage with the concept of Radical Hope and recent critical changes related to decoloniality at the Pitt Rivers Museum and in the wider sector.
This online conversation will address what it means for museums like the Pitt Rivers Museum to engage with the legacy of coloniality that lies at the root of its collecting and display practices. We will explore what possibilities might occur from thinking through the philosophical concept of Radical Hope together with local and global stakeholders, as a means for redress and a more pluriversal re-imagining of the future relevance of these museums. In this first conversation, staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum will reflect on recent changes to our permanent displays resulting from an ethical review at the Museum in recent years. We will focus on the recent removal of the Shuar tsantsa (shrunken heads) as part of our ongoing collaboration with colleagues from the Universidad de San Francisco in Quito. We will share new video material of the removal process and newly curated installations, and there will be opportunities for audience questions.
Speakers: Laura Van Broekhoven, Pitt Rivers Museum Director; Marina Patricia Ordoñez, Curator and researcher; Marina de Alarcon, Head of Collections; Jeremy Uden, Head of Conservation.
The ethnographic museum is full. Clothes, objects and tools fill the walls and floors. But where is the love?
The three speakers take the exhibition ‘Losing Venus’ as their starting point to discuss how emotion, intimacy, care and love can be brought back into the ethnographic museum and radiate out from its collections.
This event will run on Zoom, and will be available to view after the event. A link to the event will be emailed to you via Eventbrite within 48 hours of the event starting.