Museum Archipelago
109 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 92 ratingsA tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Museum Archipelago believes that no museum is an island and that museums are not neutral.
Taking a broad definition of museums, host Ian Elsner brings you to different museum spaces around the world, dives deep into institutional problems, and introduces you to the people working to fix them. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let’s get started.
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Episodes
104. What Large Institutions Can Learn From Small Museums
February 26, 2024 20:30 - 14 minutes - 20.4 MBThe Murney Tower Museum (https://www.murneytower.com) in Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a small museum. Open for only four months of the year and featuring only one full-time staff member, the museum is representative of the many small institutions that make up the majority of museums. With only a fraction of the resources of large institutions, this long tail distribution of small museums offers the full range of museum services: collection management, public programs, and curated exhibits. Dr...
103. How Computers Transformed Museums and Created A New Type of Professional
November 13, 2023 17:30 - 14 minutes - 20.6 MBComputing work keeps museums running, but it’s largely invisible. That is, unless something goes wrong. For Dr. Paul Marty (https://marty.cci.fsu.edu/), Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University and his colleague Kathy Jones (https://extension.harvard.edu/faculty/katherine-burton-jones/), Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School, shining a light on the behind-the-scenes activities of museum technology workers was one of the main r...
102. Copies in Museums
July 31, 2023 17:15 - 14 minutes - 13.9 MBOn Berlin’s Museum Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Island), four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum (https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/pergamonmuseum/home/). Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE in Samʼal (Zincirli) in southern Turkey. And one is a plaster copy made a little over 100 years ago. Pergamon Museum curator Pinar Durgun (https://alexandriaarchive.org/2021/06...
101. Buzludzha Always Centered Visitor Experience. Dora Ivanova is Using Its Structure to Create a New One.
January 23, 2023 15:45 - 19 minutes - 19.7 MBSince it opened in 1981 to celebrate the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha has centered the visitor experience. Every detail and sightline of the enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future – a kind of alternate Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan...
100. The Archipelago Museum
November 28, 2022 16:30 - 11 minutes - 9.13 MBIn the early days of this podcast, every time I searched for Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top result would be a small museum in rural Finland called the Archipelago Museum. As my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. Instead, I wondered what they were up to. What were the exhibits about? Did they ever come across my podcast? Were they annoyed by my similar name? And while the museum had a website and a map, there ...
99. Museums in Video Games
August 08, 2022 14:15 - 14 minutes - 11.5 MBThe Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games, so it lets them. The artifacts are fully-playable video games, from early arcade classics like PacMac to modern console and PC games, all with original hardware and controllers. By putting video games in a museum space, the Computer Games Museum invites visitors to become players. But, players can become visitors too. Video games have been inviting players into museum spaces for decades. In the mid 1990s, interact...
98. At the Panama Canal Museum, Ana Elizabeth González Creates a Global Connection Point
February 14, 2022 16:15 - 13 minutes - 12 MBWhen Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned about the Panama Canal in school told a narrow story about the engineering feat of the Canal’s construction by the United States. This public history reflected the politics of Panama and control over the Canal. Today, González is executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum, and she’s determined to use the Canal and the struggles over its authority to tell a broader story about the history of Panama – one centered ...
97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does.
January 17, 2022 15:15 - 14 minutes - 14.5 MBAs the Apollo 11 astronauts hurtled towards the moon on July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the astronauts didn’t make it – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Richard Nixon would have to address the nation. That haunting speech was written but fortunately was never delivered. But you can go to the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City and watch Ni...
96. Tegan Kehoe Explores American Healthcare Through 50 Museum Artifacts
November 15, 2021 15:00 - 14 minutes - 15.2 MBPublic historian and writer Tegan Kehoe knows that museum visitors act differently around the same object presented in different contexts—like how the same visitor excited by a bayonet that causes a triangular wound in an exhibit of 18th-century weapons could be disgusted by that same artifact when it’s presented in an exhibit of 18th-century medicine. Kehoe, who specialises in the history of healthcare and medical science, is attuned to how objects can inspire empathy, especially in the heal...
95. The Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland Knows Even the Most Futuristic Technology Will One Day Be History
August 31, 2021 03:45 - 11 minutes - 13.6 MBIn 1969, noticing that technological progress was changing their fields, heads of Finish industry came together to found a technology museum in Finland. Today, the Museum of Technology in Helsinki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Technology,_Helsinki) is the only general technological museum in the country. But of course, technical progress didn’t stop changing, as service coordinator Maddie Hentunen notes, and that can be challenging for a museum to keep up. In this episode, Hentun...
94. Jazz Dottin Guides Viewers Through Massachusetts’s Buried Black History
June 28, 2021 12:45 - 11 minutes - 9.55 MBThe deliberate exclusion of Black history and the history of slavery in the American South has been slow to reverse. But Jazz Dottin, creator and host of the Black Gems Unearthed YouTube channel says it can be just as slow in New England. Each video features Dottin somewhere in her home state of Massachusetts, often in front of a plaque or historical marker, presenting what’s missing, excluded, or downplayed. The history discussed on Black Gems Unearthed has been left out by conventional mus...
93. Bulgaria’s Narrow Gauge Railway Winds Through History. Ivan Pulevski Helped Turn One of Its Station Stops Into a Museum.
June 07, 2021 13:30 - 11 minutes - 9.45 MBIn 1916, concerned that the remote Rhodope mountains would be hard to defend against foreign invaders, a young Bulgarian Kingdom decided to build a narrow gauge railway to connect villages and towns to the rest of the country. The Bulgarian King himself, Tsar Boris III, drove the first locomotive to the town of Belitsa to celebrate its opening. But the Septemvri - Dobrinishte Narrow Gauge Railway would far outlast the King and the Kingdom, the communist era that followed, and the rocky post-c...
92. The Pleven Panorama Museum Transports Visitors Through Time, But Not Space
May 03, 2021 12:45 - 12 minutes - 10.1 MBThe Pleven Panorama transports visitors through time, but not space. The huge, hand-painted panorama features the decisive battles of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78, fought at this exact spot, which led to Bulgaria’s Liberation. The landscape of Pleven, Bulgaria depicted is exactly what you see outside the building, making it seem like you’re witnessing the battle on an observation point. Bogomil Stoev is a historian at the Pleven Panorama, which opened in 1977. The opening was timed to ...
92. The Pleven Panorama Puts Visitors Inside the Decisive Battle of Bulgarian Liberation
May 03, 2021 12:45 - 12 minutes - 10.1 MBThe Pleven Panorama transports visitors through time, but not space. The huge, hand-painted panorama features the decisive battles of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78, fought at this exact spot, which led to Bulgaria’s Liberation. The landscape of Pleven, Bulgaria depicted is exactly what you see outside the building, making it seem like you’re witnessing the battle on an observation point. Bogomil Stoev is a historian at the Pleven Panorama, which opened in 1977. The opening was timed to ...
91. How Fake Museums Are Used in Theme Parks with Shaelyn Amaio
April 19, 2021 15:30 - 12 minutes - 11.8 MBMuseums can be a shorthand for truth, or for history, or for what a culture values. Disney theme parks all around the world use fake museums as a tool to immerse visitors in the themed environment. This detailed world-building can make the imaginary universe more real—or provide a setup to subvert a narrative. But these fake museums aren’t the only ways the Disney theme parks present history to visitors. Public experience advocate Shaelyn Amaio describes how the parks “traffic in the past.” ...
90. Civil Rights Progress Isn't Linear. The Grove Museum Interprets Tallahassee's Struggle in an Unexpected Setting.
March 15, 2021 16:15 - 14 minutes - 12.2 MBThe Grove Museum inside the historic Call/Collins House is one of Tallahassee’s newest museums, and it’s changing how the city interprets its own history. Instead of focusing on the mansion house’s famous owners, including Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, Executive Director John Grandage oriented the museum around civil rights. Cleverly tracing how Collins’s thinking on race relations evolved, the museum uses the house and the land it sits on to tell the story of the forced removal of indigeno...
89. Tehmina Goskar Critically Engages with Curation, Wherever It Happens
February 22, 2021 15:30 - 14 minutes - 12.9 MBDr. Tehmina Goskar, director of the Curatorial Research Centre, co-founded MuseumHour with Sophie Ballinger in October 2014. The weekly peer-to-peer chat on Twitter “holds space for debate” for museum people all around the world. This month, Goskar officially steps back from her role at MuseumHour. This episode serves as both an “exit interview” for Goskar’s MusuemHour work and a chance to highlight other projects that she has founded based on her curatorial philosophy. In this episode, Gosk...
88. Jérôme Blachon Collects and Transmits Precious Memories at the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France
January 25, 2021 14:00 - 7 minutes - 5.96 MBDuring World War II, a Nazi collbatoring regime governed the south of France, and the city of Toulouse was a Resistance hub. The Vichy Government promoted anti-Semitism and collaborated with the Nazis, most specifically by deporting Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Fragmented Resistance fighters organized to form escape networks and build logistics chains to sabotage and disrupt the regime. In 1977, former Resistance members created a community museum in Toulouse about their exp...
87. The Vitosha Bear Museum Lives in a Tiny Mountain Hut
November 16, 2020 16:00 - 9 minutes - 7.42 MBVitosha Mountain, the southern border of Sofia, Bulgaria, is home to about 15 brown bears and one bear museum. According to Dr. Nikola Doykin, fauna expert at the Vitosha Nature Park Directorate, the bear population is stable—if humans stay away and protect their habitat. To Doykin and his team, teaching children about the bears is the best way forward, and the Vitosha Bear Museum does just that. Founded in 2002 by repurposing an abandoned mountain shelter for the Vitosha mountain rangers, th...
86. Nashid Madyun Fights the Compression of Black History at the Meek-Eaton Black Archives
September 21, 2020 14:00 - 13 minutes - 11.8 MBHistory professor Dr. James Eaton taught his students with the mantra: “African American History is the History of America.” As chair of the history department at FAMU, a historically Black University in Tallahassee, Florida, he was used to teaching students how to use interlibrary loan systems and how to access rare book collections for their research. But in the early 1970s, as his students' research questions got more in depth and dove deeper into Black history, he realized that there simp...
85. The John G. Riley House is All That Remains of Smokey Hollow. Althemese Barnes Turned It Into a Museum on Tallahassee’s Black History
August 31, 2020 14:00 - 14 minutes - 14.2 MBDuring the period of Jim Crow and the Black Codes, a self-sustaining Black enclave called Smokey Hollow developed near downtown Tallahassee, Florida. As the first Black principal of Lincoln High School, John G. Riley was a critical part of the neighborhood. In 1890, he built a two-story house for his family—only about three blocks from where he was born enslaved. In the 1960s, the city of Tallahassee seized and destroyed the neighborhood as part of an urban renewal project through eminent d...
84. On Richmond’s Transformed Monument Avenue, A Group of Historians Erect Rogue Historical Markers
August 10, 2020 13:45 - 14 minutes - 10.7 MBNear the empty pedestals of Confederate figures that used to tower over Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, a new type of historical marker now stands. The markers have most of the trappings of a state-erected historical plaque—but these are rogue markers erected by a group of anonymous historians called History is Illuminating. History is Illuminating decided to use historical markers as a medium to talk about the Black history taking place while those statues were erected as monuments to...
83. Chris Newell Forges The Snowshoe Path as the First Wabanaki Leader of the Abbe Museum
July 06, 2020 13:45 - 14 minutes - 12 MBChris Newell remembers the almost giddy level of excitement he felt when he visited the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine as a kid. Every summer, the family drove for more than two hours for his father to perform songs about their Passamaquoddy language at the Native Market and the Native American Festival hosted by the museum. But even as a young person, Newell could clearly see the difference between the the Native Market and the Festival, which were run by members of the Wabanaki Nations, a...
82. Statues and Museums
June 15, 2020 13:00 - 11 minutes - 8.53 MBIn the wake of the racist murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent 17th Century slave trader. Protesters rolled the statue through the street and pushed it into Bristol Harbor — the same harbor where Colston’s Royal African Company ships that forcibly carried 80,000 people from Africa to the Americas used to dock. In this episode, we examine the relationship of statues and museums. Why do so many call for...
81. Living History in a Pandemic at Old Sturbridge Village
June 01, 2020 13:30 - 12 minutes - 10.3 MBOld Sturbridge Village is a living history museum in Massachusetts depicting life in rural New England during the early 19th century. But the early 19th century isn’t specific enough for the site’s historical interpreters—to immerse visitors in the world they’re recreating, knowing exactly what year it “is” matters. Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village was tasked with choosing that “default” date. He chose 1838 in part because the social and politi...
80. British Museum Curator Sushma Jansari Shares Stories and Experiments of Decolonising Museums
May 04, 2020 13:45 - 15 minutes - 13.5 MBThe British Museum’s South Asia Collection is full of Indian objects. Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum, does not want visitors to overlook the violence of how these objects were brought to the UK to be held in a museum. So for the 2017 renovation of the South Asia Collection, Jansari, who is the first curator of Indian descent of this collection, made sure to create unexpected moments in the gallery. She highlighted artifacts bequeathed to the m...
79. The Future of Hands-On Museum Exhibits with Paul Orselli
April 20, 2020 14:00 - 13 minutes - 10.5 MBThe modern museum invites you to touch. Or it would, if it wasn’t closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The screens inside the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC say “touch to begin” to an empty room. The normally cacophonous hands-on exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco sit eerily silent. Museum exhibit developer Paul Orselli of Paul Orselli Workshop says he’ll be reluctant to use hands-on exhibits once museums open up again. But he hopes that ...
78. How Museums Present Public Health with Raven Forest Fruscalzo
March 30, 2020 13:45 - 13 minutes - 10.2 MBMuseums across the globe are now closed because of Covid-19. Some of those shuttered galleries presented the science behind outbreaks like the one we’re living through. As Raven Forrest Fruscalzo, Content Developer at the Field Museum in Chicago and host of the Tiny Vampires Podcast points out, the fact that museums are closed is an important statement: they trust the scientific information. In this episode, Forrest Fruscalzo discusses the people that make up public health, how museums can be...
77. Trump Asks, “Who's Next?” Lyra Monteiro Answers, Washington’s Next!
March 16, 2020 13:30 - 14 minutes - 10.6 MBThe statue of George Washington in New York City's Union Square commemorates him on a particular day—November 25th, 1783—the date when the defeated British Army left Manhattan after the American Revolutionary War. The statue celebrates the idea that Washington brought freedom to the country, but professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro researched how many people of African descent that Washington was enslaving on that same date: 271. Representing these people for...
76. 400 Years Post-Mayflower, the Provincetown Museum Rethinks Its Historical Branding
March 02, 2020 15:15 - 12 minutes - 9.73 MBSometimes, a historical event is all about the branding. And the brand of Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts as the spot where the Mayflower pilgrims first disembarked 400 years ago this year is pretty strong. The branding is strong enough to override the fact that the Mayflower actually first landed on the other side of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown. The Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum commemorates that site. And even within a museum that’s trying to correct an inaccur...
75. Museduino: Using Open Source Hardware to Power Museum Exhibits
February 17, 2020 15:00 - 10 minutes - 7.92 MBProprietary technology that runs museum interactives—everything from buttons to proximity sensors—tends to be expensive to purchase and maintain. But Rianne Trujillo (http://www.riannetrujillo.com), lead developer of the Cultural Technology Development Lab (http://www.cctnewmexico.org/ctdl/) at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU), realized that one way museums can avoid expensive, proprietary solutions to their technology needs is by choosing open source alternatives. She is part of the t...
74. 'Houston, We Have A Restoration' with Sandra Tetley
January 13, 2020 17:00 - 14 minutes - 11.3 MBEvery time an Apollo astronaut said the word Houston, they were referring not just to a city, but a specific room in that city: Mission Control. In that room on July 20, 1969, NASA engineers answered radio calls from the surface of the moon. Sitting in front of rows of green consoles, cigarettes in hand, they guided humans safely back to earth, channeling the efforts of the thousands and thousands of people who worked on the program through one room. But until recently, that room was kind of ...
73. Sanchita Balachandran Shifts the Framework for Conservation with Untold Stories
December 02, 2019 13:45 - 14 minutes - 11.8 MBThe field of conservation was created to fight change: to prevent objects from becoming dusty, broken, or rusted. But fighting to keep cultural objects preserved creates a certain mindset — a mindset where it’s too easy to imagine objects and cultures in a state of stasis. Sanchita Balachandran, Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, founded Untold Stories to change that mindset in the conservation profession. Through events at the annual meetings of the American Inst...
72. ‘Speechless: Different by Design’ Reframes Accessibility and Communication in a Museum Context
November 18, 2019 14:45 - 14 minutes - 11.2 MBMuseums tend to be verbal spaces: there’s usually a lot of words. Galleries open with walls of text, visitors are presented with rules of do and don'ts, and audio guides lead headphone-ed users from one piece to the next, paragraph by paragraph. But Speechless: Different by Design, a new exhibit at the Dallas Art Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, guides visitors as far away as possible from words with six custom art installations. In this episode, curator Sarah Schleuning and gr...
71. Assessing Curatorial Work for Social Justice With Elena Gonzales
October 28, 2019 14:45 - 15 minutes - 12 MBMuseums are seen as trustworthy, but what if that trust is misplaced? Chicago-based independent curator Elena Gonzales provides a solid jumping off point for thinking critically about museums in her new book, Exhibitions for Social Justice. The book is a whirlwind tour of different museums, examining how they approach social justice. It’s also a guide map for anyone interested in a way forward. In this episode, Gonzales takes us on a tour of some of the main themes of the book, examining t...
70. The Gabrovo Museum of Humor Bolsters Its Legacy of Political Satire Post-Communism
September 30, 2019 11:15 - 11 minutes - 11.2 MBTo the extent that there was a Communist capital of humor in the last half of the 20th century, it was Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Situated in a valley of the Balkan mountains, the city prides itself on its unique brand of self-effacing humor. In 1972, the Museum House of Humor and Satire opened here, and the city celebrated political humor with people in Soviet block countries and even some invited Western guests. Today, three decades after the collapse of Communism, the Museum House of Humor and Sat...
69. Soviet Spacecraft in the American Heartland: The Story of the Kansas Cosmosphere
August 26, 2019 11:30 - 11 minutes - 21 MBFrom Apollo Mission Control in Houston, Texas, to the field in southeastern Russia where Yuri Gargarin finished his first orbit, there are many sites on earth that played a role in space exploration. But Hutchinson, Kansas isn’t one of them. And yet, Hutchinson—a town of 40,000 people—is home to the Cosmosphere, a massive space museum. The Cosmosphere boasts an enormous collection of spacecraft, including the largest collection of Soviet space hardware anywhere outside Russia. How did all of...
68. The Akomawt Educational Initiative Forges a Snowshoe Path to Indigenize Museums
August 05, 2019 12:00 - 14 minutes - 21.9 MBAkomawt is a Passamaquoddy word for the snowshoe path. At the beginning of winter, the snowshoe path is hard to find. But the more people pass along and carve out this path through the snow during the season, the easier it becomes for everyone to walk it together. endawnis Spears (https://www.akomawt.org/about-us.html) (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw) is director of programming and outreach for the Akomawt Educational Initiative (https://www.akomawt.org). She saw a need to supply regional e...
67. Cité de l'Espace Celebrates Apollo Day from the Middle of the Space Race
July 15, 2019 11:45 - 8 minutes - 12.9 MBCité de l'Espace (https://en.cite-espace.com/) in Toulouse, France is a museum in the middle. It is in the middle of France’s Aerospace Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospace_Valley) and the European Space Industry. But it is also geographically in the middle of the two competing superpowers in the Space Race that ended with Apollo 11. From its vantage point in the middle, Cité de l'Espace has its own story to tell. The museum features a mix of Soviet and American space hardware, lik...
66. From ‘Extinct Monsters’ to ‘Deep Time’: A History of the Smithsonian Fossil Hall
June 17, 2019 12:00 - 14 minutes - 21.3 MBThe most-visited room in the most-visited science museum in the world reopened last week after a massive, five year renovation (https://extinctmonsters.net/2019/06/14/deep-time-is-a-masterpiece/). Deep Time, as the new gallery is colloquially known, is the latest iteration of the Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. It might not seem like much in geologic time, but the Smithsonian Fossil Hall has been welcoming visitors for more than 100 years...
65. Sarah Nguyen Helps Fight Digital Decay with Preserve This Podcast
June 03, 2019 12:00 - 11 minutes - 16.5 MBEverything decays. In the past, human heritage that decayed slowly enough on stone, vellum, bamboo, silk, or paper could be put in a museum—still decaying, but at least visible. Today, human heritage is decaying on hard drives. Sarah Nguyen (https://twitter.com/snewyuen), a MLIS student at the University of Washington, is the project coordinator of Preserve This Podcast (http://preservethispodcast.org/), a project and podcast of the same name that proposes solutions to fight against the thre...
64. Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Atlantis Experience Is Part Museum, Part Themed Attraction
May 13, 2019 12:30 - 13 minutes - 20.4 MBThe Space Shuttle Atlantis Experience, which opened at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Space_Center_Visitor_Complex) in Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2013 brings visitors “nose to nose” with one of the three remaining Space Shuttle orbiters. The team that built it used principles of themed attraction design to introduce visitors to the orbiter and the rest of the exhibits. Atlantis is introduced linearly and deliberately: visitors see two movies about...
63. Sex and Death Are on Display at The Museum of Old and New Art
April 29, 2019 12:00 - 9 minutes - 15.5 MBThe Museum of Old and New Art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art) opened in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia in 2011. With a name like that, MONA (https://mona.net.au/) could include any type of art. But looking at the collection, it’s clear that its creator, millionaire gambler David Walsh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Walsh_(art_collector)), has a fascination with sex and death -- and bets that the rest of us do too. Walsh himself calls MONA a “subversive adult Disn...
62. David Gough Reclaims Stewardship of Tiagarra for Aboriginal Tasmanians
April 15, 2019 11:45 - 14 minutes - 20.9 MBThe displays at the Tiagarra Cultural Centre and Museum (https://tiagarra.weebly.com/) in Devonport, Tasmania, Australia were built in 1976 (https://tiagarra.weebly.com/tiagarra-opening-and-timeline-1975---1979.html) by non-indigenous citizens and scientists without consulting Aboriginal Tasmanians. David Gough (http://www.utas.edu.au/community/naidoc/community-bio-david-gough), chairperson of the Six Rivers Aboriginal Corporation, (https://www.facebook.com/groups/434417366698696/) remembers ...
61. Jody Steele Centers the Convict Women of Tasmania's Penal Colonies at the Female Factory
April 01, 2019 12:15 - 14 minutes - 21.2 MBPenal transportation from England to Australia from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s was used to expand Britain's spheres of influence and to reduce overcrowding in British prisons. The male convict experience is well-known, but the Cascades Female Factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascades_Female_Factory) in Hobart is at the center of a shift in how Australians think of the role that female convicts played in the colonization of Tasmania. Dr. Jody Steele, the heritage interpretation man...
60. Stephanie Cunningham on the Creation and Growth of Museum Hue
March 18, 2019 10:00 - 14 minutes - 20.4 MBThe fight for racial diversity in museums and other cultural institutions is not new: people of color have been fighting for inclusion in white mainstream museums for over 50 years (https://amzn.to/2udBIYZ). Dispose these efforts, change has been limited. A 2018 survey by the Mellon Foundation (https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/e5/a3/e5a373f3-697e-41e3-8f17-051587468755/sr-mellon-report-art-museum-staff-demographic-survey-01282019.pdf) found that 88% of people in museum leadership positio...
59. Faith Displayed As Science: How Creationists Co-opted Museums with Julie Garcia
March 04, 2019 12:00 - 14 minutes - 20.6 MBThere’s a new tool in young-Earth creationists' quest for scientific legitimacy: the museum. Over the past 25 years, dozens of so-called creation museums have been built, including the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Creation Museum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum) in Kentucky. Borrowing the style of natural history museums and science centers, these public display spaces use the form and rhetoric of mainstream science to support a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, including t...
58. Joe Galliano Fills In The UK’s Family Tree At The Queer Britain Museum
February 11, 2019 13:30 - 13 minutes - 19.1 MBJoe Galliano (https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephgalliano) came up with the idea for Queer Britain (https://twitter.com/queer_britain), the UK’s national LGBTQ+ museum, during the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Offences_Act_1967). Discouraged by the focus on male homosexuality and on legislation, he launched a bid to preserve histories that have been ignored or destroyed. If all goes well, the muse...
57. The Colored Conventions Project Resurrects Disremembered History With Denise Burgher, Jim Casey, Gabrielle Foreman, & Many Others
January 28, 2019 13:00 - 15 minutes - 22.8 MBIn American history most often told, the vitality of Black activism has been obscured in favor of celebrating white-lead movements. In the 19th century, an enormous network of African American activists created a series of state and national political meetings known as the Colored Conventions Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Conventions_Movement). The Colored Conventions Project (http://coloredconventions.org) (CCP) is a Black digital humanities initiative dedicated to identif...
56. Lana Pajdas Trains Her ‘Fun Museums’ Lens to Croatian Heritage Sites, From The Battle of Vukovar to Over-Tourism in Dubrovnik
January 07, 2019 15:30 - 10 minutes - 16.1 MBLana Pajdas (https://twitter.com/LanaPajdas) is the founder of Fun Museums (http://funmuseums.eu), a heritage and culture travel blog with a radical idea: museums are fun. It is the guiding principle of her museum marketing, consulting work (http://funmuseums.eu), and even her photographs (https://www.instagram.com/funmuseums). In this episode, Pajdas describes Heritage Sites in her native Croatia, from the interpretation of the 1991 Battle of Vukovar at the Vukovar Municipal Museum (https://...