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Contemporary Indian museums as “feminist” spaces of care Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2024-08-01 Neha Khetrapal
Discussions about renegotiating the museum space have tended – thus far – to come from the Global North. By applying a feminist framework to examine the exhibits of three different Indian museums, ...
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“Truth is like fire”: an interview with Ibrahima Seck Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2024-06-13 Ian Beamish, Ibrahima Seck
Published in Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Towards the pluriversal museum: from epistemic violence to ecologies of knowledges Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Paul Basu
Climate change, species extinction and accelerating inequalities are manifestations of a more fundamental crisis facing humanity: the global dominance of a capitalist/colonialist world order based ...
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Review of Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Clara Vlessing
Published in Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Museums and societal collapse: the museum as lifeboat Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Jennie Morgan
Published in Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Participatory museum projects with refugee-background young people Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Sarah Linn, Olivia A. Hall, Caitlin Nunn, Jennifer Cromwell
Museums in the Global North have turned to participatory practices with traditionally marginalized groups in response to social and political pressures to become more inclusive and relevant and to ...
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Editorial Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Jamie Larkin, Colin Sterling
Published in Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse (Vol. 16, No. 2, 2022)
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How social media users experience museum posting on social issues Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Sophia Bakogianni
In summer 2020, many museums posted on their social media accounts statements of solidarity with the anti-racism and Black Lives Matter protests spread out in the USA and worldwide, despite their o...
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Taking time to listen and learn: a museum partnership designed to engage rural audiences in climate change conversations Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Mary Ann Steiner, Karen Knutson, Kevin Crowley, Nicole Heller, Bonnie McGill, Laurie Giarratani, Jay Russell, Taiji Nelson
A research-practice partnership between museum-based educators and scientists, learning researchers, and rural community members was designed to support climate change education in public settings....
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Antidote to anarchy: the Matilda Joslyn Gage House as a site of social justice dialogue Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Emily Stokes-Rees
Responding to Franklin Vagnone and Deborah Ryan’s 2016 call for historic houses across the nation to change – to embrace anarchy – in order to ensure survival, this paper presents the Matilda Josly...
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Climate versus culture: how Canadian museums are confronting the climate crisis Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Dayna Obbema
It has become widely accepted in the popular imaginary of Canada that humans are a major driving factor in the climate crisis. More recently, many large-scale museums and cultural institutions have...
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Public history for a post-truth era: fighting denial through memory movements Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2023-04-30 Florence Evans
Published in Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse (Vol. 16, No. 2, 2022)
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Towards reparative museology Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2023-01-22 Colin Sterling, Jamie Larkin
Published in Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse (Vol. 15, No. 1-2, 2021)
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Geographies of Truth: Art and symbolic repair at Casa de la Memoria Museum Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2023-01-12 Adriana Valderrama Lopez
Published in Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse (Vol. 16, No. 1, 2022)
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“Working things out”: a back-stage examination of museum documentation Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Quoc-Tan Tran
ABSTRACT The virtuality and materiality of the digital have created new opportunities for museums to facilitate modes of collaboration and participation centered on marginal actors who were previously ignored or uninvolved in the construction of the social worlds they inhabit. This article examines the limits and fragility of one such mode of participation: museum documentation work. Drawing on staff
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Contested Holdings: Museum collections in political, epistemic and artistic processes of return Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Cintia Velázquez-Marroni
Published in Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse (Vol. 15, No. 1-2, 2021)
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Addressing social issues in informal STEM learning: a review of progress, potential, and gaps Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Kris Morrissey, John Fraser, Theresa Ball
This research synthesizes recent literature about the ways the informal learning field is engaging with social issues, with a specific focus on the position of STEM knowledge in those efforts. Thro...
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Care, repair, and the future social relevance of museums Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Nuala Morse
ABSTRACT This intervention reflects on examples of UK museum and gallery outreach and engagement activity that took place during the COVID-19 lockdown. This included creative packs sent to people who were shielding, online sessions for mental health service users, and phone services for isolated older adults, part of a range of efforts to continue connections while buildings were closed. Though seemingly
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Exhibitions about mental health – a platform for repairing perceptions and developing literacy Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-08-03 Paul Piwko, Alexandra Orlandi, Renee Folzenlogen, Peter Szto, Christina Yocca, Rachel Terrill, Philip T. Yanos
ABSTRACT Museums are discovering their role relative to health literacy. The growing number of mental health exhibitions may preface a “golden age” of museums advancing mental health by addressing stigma and fostering education with credibility, resources, and infrastructure. This paper provides a typology of mental health exhibitions and examines visitor responses to Mental Health: Mind Matters, adapted
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Under Oshun’s Gaze: Africana religions as a model for repatriation Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Amanda Furiasse
ABSTRACT Questions about museums’ responsibilities to return looted African religious artifacts in their collections continue to create a number of challenges for US museums. This article assesses these challenges from the perspective of the Brooklyn Museum and the Fowler Museum at UCLA. While pioneering two different strategies, they both reimagine the restitution process as one where source communities
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Pollution and permanence: museum repair in toxic worlds Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-06-16 Torgeir Rinke Bangstad
ABSTRACT This article explores what repair might mean in the context of enduring toxic legacies of past museum practice. For centuries, museums have applied a wide range of pesticidal and preservative chemicals on objects to prevent insect infestation and material decay. This paper theorizes such chemicals as a significant museum technology which aided the perpetuation of museum objects, and both responded
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Peripheral witnessing: needlework repair in Tacita Dean’s “Darmstädter Werkblock” (2007) Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-06-14 Ren Ewart
ABSTRACT This short provocation considers the entangling potential of visible needlework mending, using Tacita Dean’s 2007 film Darmstädter Werkblock to question how paying attention to sites of repair can highlight ongoing, often unnoticed, forms of maintenance within an institution. During the film Darmstädter Werkblock, Dean pays homage to the markers of age in the original textile paneling of Block
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“We felt unsafe.” Rethinking risk, harm, and safety in museums Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-06-09 Suse Anderson
ABSTRACT Museums are often imagined as “safe spaces for unsafe ideas,” yet such a conception ignores the real harms that museums can cause to individuals, communities, and publics. While, as a sector, we are skilled at calculating risks to the collection or institution, potential risks to publics, including staff, are rarely considered with the same rigor. It is still too rare that the question, “who
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Repairing online spaces for “safe” outreach with older adults Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-04-20 Cassandra Kist
ABSTRACT Despite the widely recognized importance in the museum sector of cultivating safe, welcoming spaces for projects that work towards social change, few studies consider how feelings of safety can be cultivated online. To provide insight for future museum practices, this study focuses on a series of collaborative sessions facilitated by a museum outreach institution and a social enterprise to
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Joining reinterpretation to reparations Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-04-19 Marla R. Miller, Karen Sánchez-Eppler
ABSTRACT In 1752, on land cultivated by Nonotuck and other Indigenous people for millennia, Moses and Elizabeth Porter established a farmstead along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts. This property remained in the family for 200 years, becoming a museum in 1949. A traditional historic house museum for decades, more recently the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum has shifted focus to the site’s
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Who cares? Museum conservation between colonial violence and symbolic repair Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-03-30 Noémie Etienne
ABSTRACT Recently, museums have been under growing scrutiny. The public debate has focused mainly on two things: The way cultures and objects are presented and displayed in museum galleries and the questions of restitution. However, 80–99% of a museum's collection is and will probably remain in storage. This paper changes the focus from exhibition or restitution to conservation, understood as a set
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Time to mend: rewilding museums Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Bridget McKenzie
ABSTRACT This is an account of an enquiry by Climate Museum UK (CMUK) into the potential of rewilding museums towards systemic repair. Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation enabling natural processes to reshape places. To rewild museums bears the implication that museums must rewild themselves if they are to be agents for rewilding of the Earth. This might mean undertaking mission-altering
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Editorial Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2022-01-05 Jamie Larkin, Colin Sterling
(2019). Editorial. Museums & Social Issues: Vol. 14, No. 1-2, pp. 1-3.
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Reshaping public memory in the 1619 project: rhetorical interventions against selective forgetting Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2021-10-27 Sydney Goggins
ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the New York Times’ The 1619 Project and its engagement with public memory, focusing primarily on two articles, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jamelle Bouie, that reframe America’s political history. While every piece in The 1619 project, and the archive as a whole, engages meaningfully with public memory, these pieces are most representative of the archive’s rhetorical interventions
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Influence of an art museum visit on individuals’ psychological and physiological indicators of stress Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2021-10-10 Kristina Ter-Kazarian, Jessica J. Luke
ABSTRACT In recent years, museums have actively embraced their role in health and well-being. Although the interest in examining museums’ health impacts is growing, the field lacks robust evidence of measurable well-being benefits that would allow art museums to expand their social role and realize their health-enhancing potential for the communities they serve. The purpose of our study was to explore
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The balancing act. Museums as spaces for democratic debate: a case study from Oslo, Norway Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2021-09-02 Sofie Scheen Jahnsen
ABSTRACT This paper explores the tensions that arise when museums adopt a particular moral and political standpoint while at the same time attempting to recognize and making space for a plurality of perspectives. The study draws on a visual, textual, and comparative analysis of two exhibitions: Typical at the Intercultural Museum and FOLK: from racial types to DNA sequences at the Norwegian Museum
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The benefits of collaborative zoo exhibit design through action research Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2021-08-08 Peter Kalenda
ABSTRACT This article summarizes a research study on the iterative redesign of a zoo exhibit that focused on engaging families in the learning of science to help shift their real-world conservation practices at home. This action research study, completed at the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, New York, with three zoo education staff members and a researcher, utilized participant interviews, a data collection
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Museums as agents of change: a guide to becoming a changemaker Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2021-07-07 Sarah Jesse
(2019). Museums as agents of change: a guide to becoming a changemaker. Museums & Social Issues: Vol. 14, No. 1-2, pp. 74-75.
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Viruses, Vaccines and the Public. Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2016-08-16 Judy Diamond,Julia McQuillan,Amy N Spiegel,Patricia Wonch Hill,Rebecca Smith,John West,Charles Wood
Current research in virology is changing public conceptions about vaccines and infectious disease. The University of Nebraska State Museum collaborated with research virologists, science writers, artists and learning researchers to create public outreach materials about viruses and infectious disease. The project, funded by the National Institute of Health's SEPA program, developed comics, a book with
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From the editor Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2019-07-18 David Bruce Allison
(2018). From the editor. Museums & Social Issues: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 41-42.
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The impact of social, political and racial discourses on art exhibitions – past and present? Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2019-05-21 Carolin Südkamp
(2018). The impact of social, political and racial discourses on art exhibitions – past and present? Museums & Social Issues: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 107-109.
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Museums engaging diverse Millennials in community dialogue Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2018-07-03 Johanna Claire Schuch, Susan B. Harden, Kamille Bostick, Heather A. Smith
ABSTRACT In 2016, Levine Museum of the New South (LMNS) developed an innovative Sustained Dialogue program aimed at engaging and training a diverse group of Millennials in dialogue. University researchers partnered with museum staff in the program development, implementation, and evaluation. The program led to awareness and critical reflection at multiple scales: individual, group, and the broader
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The co-production of difference? Exploring urban youths’ negotiations of identity in meeting with difficult heritage of human classification Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2018-07-03 Kaja Hannedatter Sontum
ABSTRACTThis paper explores the capacity of museums to stimulate critical reflection and dialog on constructions of human difference, and thereby to serve as agents of social change. The study draw...
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Not my ancestors! The importance of communication in the display of human remains: a case study from Australia Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2018-07-03 Jarrad W. Paul
ABSTRACT Vikings: Beyond the Legend was shown at the Melbourne Museum (Australia) amongst a backdrop of local debate when it was decided after consultation with the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee that human remains as part of the exhibit would not be displayed. This article assesses reviews and online comments related to the exhibition in Melbourne and compares them with online reviews
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Beyond gallery walls and performance halls: five essential steps museums and other cultural institutions must take to center people, communities, and cultivate effective societal change Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Stephanie Johnson-Cunningham
ABSTRACT We can commend mainstream museums and much of the arts world in their current efforts to exhibit and showcase much more talents than in past years that highlight women, artists of color, and social issues. However, the collecting and displaying of objects uphold a historical practice regarding the ongoing acculturating of visual expressions, especially those belonging to people of color. Leaders
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Collaborative tool and training design for social action Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Rebecca Joy Norlander, John C. Anderson, John Fraser, Kate Flinner
ABSTRACT Informal science education institutions (ISEIs) often work in isolation, or even in competition, with one another. However, addressing large social issues becomes more tractable when ISEIs are able to pool ideas, perspectives, and resources. Collaboration across ISEIs has high potential for developing exhibitions, programming, and professional development opportunities that effectively address
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The artist as social worker vs. the artist as social wanker Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2018-01-02 Anthony Schrag
ABSTRACT This paper briefly explores the problematic notion of the “artist as a social worker” and aims to develop an (ethical) counterpoint to this position via Mouffe’s concept of agonism. It begins by tracing some conceptual frameworks that have posited art as an ameliorative force within the public realm, discusses the complications of “intention” embedded in language, as well as draws attention
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Inclusive Indigenous Australian voices in the semiotic landscape of the National Museum of Australia Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Anne J. Cole, Eva Brooks
ABSTRACT Inclusive and broad research stresses the need for museums to be socially responsible in the representation of the various communities it represents. This article examines the curator’s representation of source communities presented in two exhibitions in the First Australians Galleries at the National Museum of Australia – investigated through the concepts of multi-voicedness, semiotic landscape
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What democracy looks like: crowd-collecting protest materials Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Barbara Cohen-Stratyner
ABSTRACT Mass political protests have emerged as a persistent theme in the presidency of Donald Trump, among them, the 300+ Women’s Marches that occurred worldwide on 21 January 2017. Collecting by curatorial staff at protests is an existing, although sometimes controversial, practice. However, in the era of social media, crowd-collecting has also become common practice. This Forum article summarizes
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Social media, social inclusion, and museum disability access Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Rebecca McMillen, Frances Alter
ABSTRACT For many people, social media is an integral part of everyday life that can lead to a greater sense of social inclusion. This article examines social media’s impact on social inclusion regarding art museum disability access. This qualitative study explores ways people with disabilities interact socially and culturally using social media and how it impacts their perception of being socially
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Suitcases, keys and handkerchiefs: how are objects being used to collect and tell migrant stories in Australian museums? Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Chiara O’Reilly, Nina Parish
ABSTRACT This article examines the particular challenges that are associated with collecting and exhibiting objects to represent immigrant narratives. Everyday objects play a crucial role in migration history and curators need to capitalise on the representational possibilities offered by these seemingly banal objects when conceiving exhibitions. This analysis concentrates on strategies used by Australian
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Materializing humanity: memorial collecting after Pulse Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Adam M. Ware
ABSTRACT On 12 June 2016, Orlando’s Pulse nightclub became the site of the largest single-shooter massacre in US history: 49 clubgoers lost their lives while celebrating Latin Night at a club popular with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community of Central Florida. In the days that followed the curators and collections staff of the Orange County Regional History Center found themselves
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Closing on a note of conciliation: on the attempt to reconcile science and religion at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Steven C. Hertler
ABSTRACT Commentary on the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Human Origins often omits a closing exhibit wherein three scientists speak about the nature of faith and evolutionary science. Two prior reviews of this exhibit criticize an effort to conciliate patrons and avoid controversy, a charge that is, in part, substantiated by an accompanying plaque disclaiming any inherent conflict between
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Curating controversy in the Trump era Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Keri Watson
ABSTRACT Successful exhibitions engage the public and encourage debate. In the era of Trump, this means curating shows that court controversy and examine issues such as xenophobia, immigration, and climate-change denial. This paper considers a recent exhibition funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, In the eyes of the hungry: Florida’s changing landscape (University of Central Florida Art Gallery
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Remembering the age of mass incarceration Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-01-02 Liz Ševčenko
In 2015, the US teetered on the apex of the age of mass incarceration. After four decades of imprisoning more people than any other country in the world, and than at any other time in its history, the US was, very slightly, beginning to reduce its prison population (Humphreys, 2016). A remarkable bipartisan consensus emerged that the policies that created mass incarceration had failed, producing a
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Reading against the grain, finding the voices of the detained Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-01-02 Mary Rizzo
ABSTRACT Every day approximately 34,000 people are held in immigration detention centers across the United States, including asylum seekers fleeing persecution and violence. Yet they are often invisible in our public discourse about immigration and mass incarceration. For the Humanities Action Lab’s States of Incarceration traveling exhibition, students at Rutgers University–Newark researched a “riot”
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Exposing intersectionalities: a reflection on mental health and incarceration in America Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-01-02 Elizabeth Nash
ABSTRACT The traveling exhibition States of Incarceration: A National Dialogue of Local Histories explores the past, present, and future of mass incarceration in the United States through the lens of local narratives, events, and historic and/or contemporary sites. Over 500 students from 20 universities worked together to stimulate a national dialog focused on how mass incarceration has shaped the
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“What are women’s prisons for?” Gendered states of incarceration and history as an agent for social change Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-01-02 Amy Halliday, Chelsea Miller, Julie Peterson
ABSTRACT As the exhibition States of Incarceration: A National Dialogue of Local Histories travels the nation, visitors will explore the roots of mass incarceration in our communities. While mass incarceration has garnered increased media and scholarly attention in recent years, mainstream analyses overlook the role of gender, even as women are the fastest-growing segment of the incarcerated population
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Public histories of incarceration: reflecting on museums and social change Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-01-02 Mayela Caro, Marissa Friedman
ABSTRACT California has a long history of criminalizing youth of color. Gang injunctions and the policies which structure the “school to prison pipeline” are contemporary expressions of this. As members of the graduate student curatorial team at the University of California Riverside, our contribution to the Humanities Action Lab’s national exhibition States of Incarceration was to chart the genealogy
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This is Indian land: a call to museums in addressing mass incarceration of American Indians Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-01-02 Amber A. Annis
ABSTRACT This essay seeks to explore why inclusion of Indian people is fundamental in the difficult histories and dialogues regarding mass incarceration and to challenge the role of museums in ensuring that Indian people are centrally located in the discussion. I argue that the inherent roots of mass incarceration are historically situated in Indian dispossession and the obtainment of Indian land,
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Reflections on creating Arizona: The Cost of Immigrant Detention Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-01-02 Ethan Clay
ABSTRACT Arizona State University graduate students created a museum panel titled Arizona: The Cost of Immigrant Detention to include in the Humanities Action Lab’s (HAL) States of Incarceration traveling exhibition. This article summarizes the panel and its contents, as well as the process of creating the panel and its accompanying online material. It also looks at the author’s personal feelings toward
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Stories from prisons, honoring loved ones Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-01-02 Hannah Galloway
ABSTRACT A history class at the University of New Orleans did a project with prisoners at Louisiana State Penitentiary to help those incarcerated honor their loved ones who are deceased. Prison guards distributed templates created by teacher Ben Weber, asking for the name, location, and story about the person they wanted to honor. Prisoners wrote in and shared their experience and the class carried
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States of Incarceration: an architectural perspective on immigrant detention in Texas Museums & Social Issues (IF 0.7) Pub Date : 2017-01-02 Sarah Lopez
ABSTRACT Buildings and landscapes are crystallizations of dominant societal beliefs and practices. Architecture also shapes peoples’ experiences of places and institutions, and provides a unique source of evidence of historical change. This article describes how students from the School of Architecture and the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin researched the spaces of migrant detention
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