Museum Cultures: Exhibiting the African Imaginary

Museums are dynamic spaces with the potential to reinvent, rehabilitate, and recenter marginalized people and collections. This year, our seminar examines and enacts museum stewardship of material cultures of diverse African communities across space, time, and context. Legacies of colonialism inspire debates on restitution, reparation, and reconciliation, alongside actions to 'decolonize' museum practice. In engaging the politics of representation and human-object relationships, our class will challenge problematic imaginaries of Africa and recenter the complexities of cultures in the Horn of Africa spanning Ethiopia, Nubian Egypt, and Sudan. Students will acquire skills in researching, curating, and installing an exhibition based on Stanford's African archeological and ethnographic materials held at the Stanford University Archeology Collections (SUAC). This course will culminate in a student-curated exhibition that opens on Friday May 27, 2022 at the Stanford Archeology Center (Bldg 500) and is planned to feature renowned Somali-Swedish archeologist, Dr. Sada Mire, as the keynote speaker.Because of limited spacing you will need to fill out this form https://forms.gle/h8F46iv5iSwiX3PY7 and receive consent to enroll in the course from the instructor. 3 credits (no final project) or 5 credits (final project). May be repeat for credit