How are Indigenous communities, museum professionals, and technology designers working together to re-shape possibilities for their associations and collaborations? How are new networked memory institutions responding to shifting political and ethical terrain for curation and media production in the digital age? In this talk, Kate Hennessy, an Assistant Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), will explore these questions through the lens of virtual exhibit projects that she has designed and produced in collaboration with Canadian Aboriginal communities, museums, and scholars in the last decade. She will discuss productive responses to controversies over cultural representation, unequal relations of power, and legacies of colonialism and how they can be traced in new digital museum networks that prioritize the building of relationships with Aboriginal communities and the generation of new knowledge that might avoid mere reproduction of colonial collecting practices. The lecture is free and open to the public and part of the Cultural Heritage Informatics lecture series, organized in conjunction with the joint Digital Infrastructure Planning for OVPR Cultural Heritage Collections project of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures and the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, with support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Indiana University.

Cost: Free

For more information contact:

Mathers Museum
(812)855-6873
[email protected]