XXIII annual meeting | 4-7 July 2023, Wroclaw, Poland
The Experience of Academic Heritage
Call for Papers
According to ICOM’s new definition of museums of 2022, museums ‘operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing’. How do these ways of experiencing apply to academic heritage? In this UNIVERSEUM annual meeting, we wanted to explore how this is resonating with your practice and with how your audiences are experiencing academic heritage.
We would like to move beyond only celebrating to also critically reflect about academic heritage and the experiences it offers and provides. Are there other directions in which you would like to take the interpretation and experience of university collections further? Should we be doing more with what we have? What are the opportunities and obstacles in realising our full potential within our collections, museums, institutions?
Subtheme 1: By whom and for whom?
University collections are presented in many different ways and are experienced by different communities and groups. Increasingly, university museums are working together with various groups to agree on themes, approaches, and interpretations of academic heritage.
- How conscious are we of our curation and interpretation processes and how these are experienced by different audiences?
- How can we find out if the experience is received as we intended and by whom? How can we learn from this? How do we react to unexpected outcomes?
- Does who is involved in the design of these experiences affect the end result and how these are experienced?
Subtheme 2: Experiencing difficult heritage
Experiencing academic heritage can go beyond having fun and joy. They can also include encountering issues and ideas from a long history of academic practices and institutional history that make us uncomfortable and can be disturbing.
- What is the role of university museums and collection custodians in this process?
- How can they facilitate and encourage debates on difficult heritage in an effective way and not hide from them?
Subtheme 3: Media and methods of interpretation
When designing experiences of academic heritage, we use various means in our disposal for presenting and interpreting these. Some of these, like storytelling, have remained unchanged over the years, while others are constantly evolving, like the use of new technologies and social media.
- How do our media and methods for setting up experiences of academic heritage, for instance the language and tools we use, affect the messages we are trying to communicate?
- And whom do we involve in the process of selecting and designing interpretative tools and approaches?
- How can we evaluate their effectiveness?
During the 2023 Universeum meeting, we want to explore different ways of encouraging discussion and debate, as well as allow as many voices from the community to be heard as possible. We would like to combine short papers, with longer in-depth contributions that reflect more broadly on these themes rather than present specific projects, as well as invite dialogue and discussions from all participants.
Deadline: 28 February 2023
