Helen Verran

 
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11/10/22
Trafficking Vague Cosmological Boundaries: Towards Knowing Experiential Relationality in Museum Epistemics
DCNtR Debate #3. The Post/Colonial Museum
This article seeks inspiration in engaging with African art works displayed amongst sculptures and paintings from European pasts in Berlin’s Bode Museum 2017–2019. Concepts at play in designing that exhibition, deriving from both history and philosophy of art and anthropology, expressed a modern spacetime cosmology. As is the modern way, it focussed on what it […]

To ‘Decenter’, You Need an Ethics of Dissensus
What does the idea of “decentering” ethnographic museums entail from the perspective of an empirical philosopher, STS-researcher and postcolonial knowledge worker? Helen Verran talks with Michi Knecht about acknowledging incompatibilities beyond universalist claims and “objects before classification” as starting points. Museums, as potential sites of the multiverse, need to seriously cultivate a culture of dissent […]

To set museum visitors thinking
Voices from the conference 'Museum Collections in Motion‘
  Helen Verran: Historian and philosopher of science, Charles Darwin University, Australia’s Northern Territory Helen Verran is a historian and philosopher of science at the Charles Darwin University in Australia’s Northern Territory where she holds the position of University Professorial Fellow in the College of Indigenous Futures, Arts and Societies. Before taking up that position […]

The Polity and the Ethnographic Museum: Where’s the Rub?

 
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10/07/19
A postcolonial moment in analytic engagement with museum ethnographic collections?
• A postcolonial moment emerges as happenings of political, cultural and epistemic work in institutional and organisational settings—it is passage, trajectory, going-on inflected in particular ways. • Postcolonialism is not a stoppage or reversal of colonialism, rather a re-gathering and diverting. It is using resources at hand, albeit in some way an outcome of the […]