Thank you for voting. The current ACASA bylaws are now available for viewing.
Please reach out to Caroline Bastian Retcher at bastian@acasaonline.org if you have any questions or issues.
Arts Council of the African Studies Association
Thank you for voting. The current ACASA bylaws are now available for viewing.
Please reach out to Caroline Bastian Retcher at bastian@acasaonline.org if you have any questions or issues.
We invite proposals for individual papers for open panels and roundtables at this time (January 19, 2024- March 1, 2024). Please see the list of open panels and roundtables at the bottom of this page. The full list of accepted panel proposals can be viewed here.
Recently the field of African arts has shifted from object-centered approaches to ones that are human-, community-, and artist-centered. Who is speaking? How can we listen to each other and invite more diverse and globally-entangled voices? Some strategies for human-centered approaches include collaboration, wellness, healing, pluralities of knowledge, the sustaining and building of relationships, fostering new generations, thinking generously and inclusively and active listening in lieu of, or in addition to, object-centered approaches. We welcome contributions on themes such as:
Regular panels will be 120 minutes long with either a) four 20-minute papers and a discussant or b) five 20-minute papers. 90-minute roundtables or alternative discussion-based formats (such as lightning talks or poster presentations) are welcome–creativity encouraged.
Participants may only present one paper but may serve as a discussant on another panel or as a presenter on a roundtable.
Individual paper proposals must include the following:
The submission deadline for paper proposals is March 1, 2024.
Please submit via the submission portal here
Proposals may be submitted by anyone, but an active ACASA membership is required to take part in the symposium. Visit https://www.acasaonline.org/join-acasa/ to find information on ACASA membership and to join.
For any questions or concerns, please email Caroline Bastian Retcher, ACASA Admin, at bastian@acasaonline.org.
Open Panels & Roundtables:
Decolonization of African Art in Museums, Covid-19, and Curating Art in Digital Space
Towards a dynamic and distributed future: interdisciplinary methods of engaging with African Art & Cultural Heritage Materials
Reimagining Creative Ways of Speaking Truth to Power in a Time of Heightened Repression
Knowledge Creation and Co-Curation in Museums and Public Spaces: Contestations and Advances
Public Art, African Histories: Asserting and Subverting Colonial Power
Photographic Transversals: Mobility, Intermediality, and Temporality in African Photography
Sea Matters: New Art Histories from Africa’s Islands and Archipelagos
“The Art that Guides Our Students: Southern University at New Orleans and the Traditional African Art Collections”
Towards a dynamic and distributed future: interdisciplinary methods of engaging with African Art & Cultural Heritage Materials
New Directions in Provenance Research
“Beautiful Space Others Make” On Care, Justice, & Creative Imagination
RE-ENGAGING THE GEARS OF CONSERVATION IN THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE IN MODERN BENIN
Jamaican Textile and the Stories of Decolonization
Audacious Art Histories: Intimacies and Interventions
Around the Object: New Directions in Museum and Curatorial Education in Africa
Ìyá: Our Mothers Who Art In Exile
Decolonization of African Art in Museums, Covid-19, and Curating Art in Digital Space
Online Visual Imaginations of the Nation
(De)Constructing Authenticity: New Methods and Case Studies
Periodizing the 1990s
THE CHALLENGES OF VISUAL ARTS ENTERPRISE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA
From Belief to Heritage: Rethinking the museum.
Women & Non-Binary South African Artists: Revisioning Histories
African continuities and change in the Caribbean, through contemporary Caribbean art
Traditions and practices of profanation at Western Museums
Raising Voices: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation
Museums in Africa and their Search for Relevance as Source and Agent of Social Wellness
Fight of the Century: The Rumble in the Jungle 50 years on
Queer Hybrids in Contemporary African Art
“Collaborating Across Continents: Developing a Contemporary Masquerade Exhibition for North American and African Audiences”
For what is Just: Social Practice Art, Solidarity and Civic Imagination in Africa
Interventions in the Colonial Photographic Archive
Nigerian Contemporary Ceramic in Retrospective View
Power: remaking selves, archives, environments
‘women’s work as creative practice’ – 4 contemporary South African artist-women/artist-mothers
The Promise and the Peril of Placing African artists in Global Narratives
#JustAndEquitableNow: Reimagining Arts and Humanities in Our Universities
Gender and Artistic Production from the Maghrib
OBJECTS REFUSE TO BE CANCELLED (#babybathwater)
The Modern in an Expanded Field?
No Comment! Explorations along the borderline of seeing, talking, and thought.
Unveiling African Arts: Reclaiming Narratives, Fostering Dialogue, and Embracing Healing
Photography in the First-Person: The Interview as Source
Critical Inquiry in Design, Media and Material Culture of Sub-Saharan Africa
Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for North American Museums Holding African Objects
Questions of Objecthood and Value
Ghana 1957: Collaborative Curation
The creation and development of museums in Senegal: origin, evolution and perspectives.
Restitutions and feedback
What is a Map? A Question Investigated through African and African Diasporic Arts and Architecture
Local museums and international collaborations: The “other side” of the story
New Dimensions of Contemporary Art Studies and Practice in Nigeria and Ghana Since 2020
Artist-Centered Approaches to African Restitution
EXPLORING VISUAL CULTURE: PLURALIZING KNOWLEDGES, EXPERTISE, AND THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGES AND EXPERTISE
Art-Making as Rituals and Rites: Exploring the Transformative Power of Creative Expression
Gender and Human Centeredness in Southern African art
Spiritual Repair: Post-Secular Black Atlantic Arts
Past/Predecessors: Modern and Contemporary African Art Between Generations
Making and Representing West African Textiles and Fashions
A Ghanaian-United States Nexus in Art Pedagogy and Practice
Reimagining Public Art: Community Engagement, Sustainability, and Urban Transformation
African Art: Traditions, Transitions and Decolonisation
VISUAL LITERACY AGAINST OPPRESSION
Digitalization, Youth Economy, and the Future of Popular Arts in Africa
Pivoting with African Art: Alt-Academic Careers Roundtable
For the first month of registration (January 5 – February 5), we are offering a discounted bundle package of $15.
This bundle is for active ACASA members only.
ACASA Triennial Symposium Registration is outlined below. Please note that each Triennial event requires separate registration (unless purchasing the bundle package). These rates are for all Triennial attendees, both in-person and virtual. Visit our website for more information about the Triennial.
Please Note: Membership is not required for attendee registration, however the cost of membership + registration is lower than the cost of non-member registration to all Triennial events. All presenters must be ACASA members. We encourage everyone to become an ACASA member. Join today!
Member: Non-Member:
Conference: $200 / $250
Awards Ceremony & Dinner: $60 / $80
Museum Day: $40 / $60
Member: Non-Member:
Conference: $225 / $275
Awards Ceremony & Dinner: $60 / $80
Museum Day: $40 / $60
Visit: https://acasatriennial2024.sched.com
Create a Sched account by email, Google, or Facebook.
Select the events you would like to attend.
Purchase through the secure link and receive email confirmation via Sched.
Follow the steps listed in the confirmation email to create a Sched profile.
Participants in ACASA’s Triennial are encouraged to stay at the recommended hotels listed below to have the greatest flexibility and engagement with other attendees, but attendees are welcome to stay in whatever accommodations suit them best.
Please, contact Caroline Bastian, ACASA Project Manager, for any questions or comments at bastian@acasaonline.org
This webinar is exclusive to ACASA members and will be held virtually over Zoom. Use the button at the bottom of this email to join or renew your membership. You must log in to your member account to register.
Highlighting provenance—the ownership history of a work of art or other object—has been growing in museums as part of important conversations about collecting and exhibiting African cultural heritage. But how much do museum visitors understand about provenance, and what is their interest in it? Do museums present provenance in a way that is engaging and easy to understand? The Department of Research and Evaluation of the Cleveland Museum of Art has undertaken audience evaluations in 2021 and 2023 that seek to answer these questions. These digital and in-person evaluation projects center on the museum’s African arts gallery, and a September 2020 reinstallation of eight works from the Benin Kingdom that include full provenance on their gallery labels in addition to on the museum’s website. As one of the few museums with an R&E department, this research represents a unique perspective on visitor viewpoints about provenance and an important tool for enhancing communication.
In this webinar, CMA’s Hannah Ridenour LaFrance (Research Manager, Department of Research & Evaluation) and Courage Kusena (Past Undergraduate Intern, Department of Research and Evaluation) will discuss the goals, methods, and findings of these evaluation projects. Facilitating the conversation, Kristen Windmuller-Luna (Curator of African Arts) will discuss the history of sharing provenance information at CMA, and consider how insight gained from evaluations of museum visitors’ engagement with and understanding of provenance can be implemented in future exhibitions.
This webinar is exclusive to ACASA members and will be held virtually over Zoom. Use the button at the bottom of this email to join or renew your membership.
The submission window is now open for the 2024 Awards for Curatorial Excellence. Submissions must be received by February 15, 2024. The awards will be presented at the 19th ACASA Triennial, to be held in Chicago from August 7-11, 2024.
The Awards for Curatorial Excellence recognize the important contributions to the dissemination and understanding of African and African Diaspora Arts made through exhibitions. Exhibitions related to permanent collections, loan shows, commissioned works or community interventions organized by museums, galleries, cultural centers, and exhibition spaces of all sorts are eligible. Up to two awards for curatorial excellence will be given. Runners up may also be recognized.
Eligibility
The exhibition should have opened between Sept. 1, 2019 and Sept. 1, 2023.
Exhibition eligibility: Both nominator and nominee(s)—if different–must be ACASA members in good standing. Join ACASA
Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered.
Submission Process and Materials
Eligible exhibitions should be uploaded by the nominator to this form with the submission materials listed below. All submission materials must be received by February 15, 2024.
All submissions should include the following materials:
Assessment Criteria
For consideration for this award, the awards committee will consider exhibitions that:
Please contact Caroline Bastian, ACASA Project Manager, for any questions or comments at bastian@acasaonline.org.
The ACASA board is pleased to announce that our 19th Triennial Symposium of African Art will take place in Chicago, Illinois, USA from August 7 through 11, 2024.
We invite proposals for panels and roundtables at this time (August 1- December 1, 2023). A call for individual papers for open panels and participation in open roundtables will follow on January 5, 2024.
Recently the field of African arts has shifted from object-centered approaches to ones that are human-, community-, and artist-centered. Who is speaking? How can we listen to each other and invite more diverse and globally-entangled voices? Some strategies for human-centered approaches include collaboration, wellness, healing, pluralities of knowledge, the sustaining and building of relationships, fostering new generations, thinking generously and inclusively and active listening in lieu of, or in addition to, object-centered approaches. We particularly invite panels that consider negotiating plurality of perspective and positionality, and diversifying forms of expertise and knowledge production.
This list is meant to be suggestive and not exhaustive, and submissions on any topic beyond the core theme are also welcome. We also welcome proposals for alternative formats – please contact Paul Basu or Amanda M. Maples if you would like to discuss.
Regular panels will be 120 minutes long with either a) four 20-minute papers and a discussant or b) five 20-minute papers. 90-minute roundtables or alternative discussion-based formats (such as lightning talks or poster presentations) are welcome–creativity encouraged.
Participants may only present one paper but may serve as a discussant on another panel or as a presenter on a roundtable.
Proposals for panels and roundtables may be open with a suggested topic or fully constituted with all proposed participants identified. Participation may be in person, virtual, or a combination of these two.
Panel and roundtable proposals must include the following:
The submission deadline for panel and roundtable proposals is December 1, 2023.
Please submit to https://www.acasaonline.org/2023-triennial-paper-proposal-submission/
Panel, roundtable, and paper proposals may be submitted by anyone, but an active ACASA membership is required to take part in the symposium. Visit https://www.acasaonline.org/join-acasa/ to find information on ACASA membership and to join.
Further deadlines:
Triennial Programming Committee:
Paul Basu, University of Oxford (paul.basu@anthro.ox.ac.uk)
Amanda M. Maples, New Orleans Museum of Art (amaples@noma.org)
George Agbo, University of Edinburgh (gagbo@exseed.ed.ac.uk)
Juliana Ribeiro da Silva Bevilacqua, Queen’s University (jrds@queensu.ca)
Zainabu Jallo, University of Basel (zainabu.jallo@unibas.ch)
Mathew Oyedele, University of Benin (oyemart@gmail.com)
Alexandra M. Thomas, Yale University (alexandra.m.thomas@yale.edu)
Tuesday, August 6 – Registration Desk opens.
Wednesday, August 7–Saturday, August 10 – Panels held at the DePaul University Loop Student Center.
Thursday, August 8 – Keynote lecture given at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Friday, August 9 – Dinner & Awards Ceremony followed by the famous ACASA Dance Party at DePaul University’s Lincoln Park Student Center.
Sunday, August 11 – Museum Day at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Stay tuned for more information and calls for papers!
The Getty Research Institute is pleased to announce themes for residential grants and fellowships for pre-docs, post-docs, and scholars at the Getty Center and Villa for the 2024/25 academic year.
Applications will open on July 1, 2023. Applications are due by October 2, 2023.
AFRICAN AMERICAN ART HISTORY INITIATIVE GRANTS
The African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI) will support two fellows to generate new knowledge in the expanding field of African American art history. As part of the larger scholar year cohort, AAAHI Fellows have opportunities to present their research and receive feedback from an interdisciplinary group of peers. While proposals do not have to address the concurrent annual theme, they may highlight any salient intersections with it.
This residential program provides financial support and housing to scholars who are expanding critical inquiry of African American art and its frameworks. Projects that propose engagement with Getty’s growing collections of archival and primary source material related to African American art history—particularly post-World War II—are welcome. However, relevance to Getty holdings is not a project requirement. We invite applications from scholars who focus on African American art and visual culture in all time periods and media and in a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions. Applicants should indicate how their project would align with AAAHI’s aim to make African American art history more visible to the public and accessible to the scholarly community worldwide.
EXTINCTION GRANTS
In this moment of extreme environmental decay and monumental epidemic loss, the Getty Scholars Program invites applications on the pressing topic of extinction and its bearing on the visual arts and cultural heritage. Scholars are asked to contemplate how representational practices are deployed to cope with the precarious survival of plants, animals, and humans; the ever-present specter of species-level extinction and resource exhaustion; and, at the most extreme pole, the brutality of mass atrocity. On another level, atrophy, decay, and obsolescence constitute the temporal dimensions of certain artistic practices, especially as creative approaches, technologies, media, formats, and ideals become outmoded or superseded. The finality of disappearance may also portend a certain amount of hope for rebirth, innovation, or recovery. We invite proposals on these topics from art historians and those from related to disciplines.
Please find the full call for applications and theme text on the Scholars Program webpage: gty.art/scholars
By Josh.Fenton
The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is Canada’s celebrated international museum and houses important collections of art, culture and nature. ROM is the largest and most attended museum in Canada, attracting more than 1.3 million visitors per year. It has a membership of over 24,000 households and 66,700 individual members and an annual budget of $80 million CAD. ROM is a world leader in communicating its research and collections to the public. A globally recognized field research institute, home to more than 13 million artworks, cultural objects and natural history specimens, ROM features 40 galleries and exhibition spaces in its original heritage building and its 2007 Michael Lee-Chin Crystal designed by Studio Daniel Libeskind.
ROM’s vision is to become a distinctly 21st-century museum, one that will be globally known for expanding the boundaries of knowledge, innovation in presenting that knowledge, and public relevance within the intersecting worlds of art, culture, and nature. To realize this vision, ROM has embarked on a new strategic direction that builds on its strengths and capabilities while evolving in step with a rapidly changing world. The Museum is becoming an ever more outward-facing institution, focused on playing a central role in community and cultural life, while increasing impact – artistic, cultural, and scientific – nationally and internationally.
Situated in the most diverse major city in the world, within a province and country known for pluralism, openness and global perspectives, ROM is well positioned for the future and for an even greater role on the world stage. By leveraging ROM’s strengths and capabilities, and applying them in fresh and far-reaching ways, by investing to create greater engagement through inclusion, transdisciplinary thinking, digital practices and innovation, ROM is charting a new and bold way forward as it pursues its goal to become one of the world’s foremost museums. Learn more about ROM’s Strategic Direction.
ROM seeks a thoughtful, strategic curator, gifted at communications and alliances, with a strong background in African contemporary, historic and diasporic art for its Curator of Global Africa position. The successful candidate will lead programming and presentation of ROM’s Global Africa collection in galleries, exhibitions, and other initiatives developed through collaboration with local communities, artists and scholars and with a commitment to using community-engaged curatorial models. This Curator will develop and implement a strategy to reinterpret the existing Global Africa collection that ROM has built in the past and to expand its holdings, especially in representation of contemporary Global Africa. The curator will expand the reach of ROM scholarship and museum initiatives through publications, lectures, and academic work. In the context of ROM’s strategic direction toward a more global, transdisciplinary storytelling model, the Global Africa curator will champion cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspectives that highlight the relevance of ROM’s collections of art, culture, and nature in contemporary societies.
The Curator of Global Africa is responsible for the development and care of ROM’s Global Africa collection, which counts over 12,000 objects from the African continent and beyond. This is the largest collection of African art in Canada and one that offers endless opportunities for engagement and collaboration with the diverse African and African diaspora communities in the Greater Toronto Area as well as researchers and students. This position will also be responsible for expanding the research on the provenance of ROM’s historical holdings, strategic deaccessioning, repatriation, and expansion of the collection in keeping with contemporary museum practice and thought in the field. In a moment when the push for repatriation recurrently questions the historical foundation of the encyclopedic museum, gallery development, exhibitions and collecting strategies must connect the past with the present in an ethically grounded, visually effective, community-minded and emotionally engaging way.
ROM welcomes candidates who are passionate about the study and interpretation of the arts of Global Africa, and who are invested in new ways of thinking about and presenting arts of Africa and its diaspora communities in an encyclopedic museum. Applicants with research specializing in historical and contemporary aspects of African art history, visual studies or material culture are encouraged to apply.
The successful candidate will work closely with local Black communities, including both Anglophone and Francophone diaspora communities, global African partners, donors, scholars, and diverse ROM audiences. Critically, the successful candidate will take a leadership role in reinterpreting ROM’s art and heritage from Global Africa and developing a new vision for both permanent and temporary displays. The curator will be a specialist within the field but also interested in broad issues and questions related to Indigenous art and cultures that have relevance in Canada and the contemporary world. Curatorial knowledge should extend widely regarding historical periods and media.
ROM is open to considering a range of candidates from an Associate Curator level to Senior Curator, consistent with the candidate’s experience and the strategic goals of the Museum. The position reports to the Co-Chief Curator, Art and Culture, and the Curator will be a member of the ROM Curatorial Union (ROMCA).
In collaboration with fundraising staff, actively cultivate support for exhibitions, galleries, programs, symposia, acquisitions, research grants, and fellowships through association with cultural and professional organizations, foundations, and patrons at the local, national and international level.
To apply in confidence, email:
1) letter expressing interest in this particular position, giving brief examples of past exhibition, programs and collections experience and proposed research areas and projects;
2) curriculum vitae;
3) names of three references with contact information.
Submit application by May 12, 2023, to retained search firm: Connie Rosemont, Museum Search & Reference, SearchandRef@museum-search.com. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply for this international search. However, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority.
Nominations are welcome.
Short-listed candidates subsequently will be asked to provide publication samples.
ROM is committed to fair and accessible employment practices. ROM considers equity, diversity, and inclusivity to be foundational to their institutional success. They seek to foster a workplace that reflects the full breadth of the communities they serve and welcomes applications from women, racialized persons, Indigenous/Aboriginal People of North America, LGBTQ2S+, and people with disabilities. Upon request, suitable accommodations are available under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disability Act (AODA) to applicants invited to an interview.
Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America. It is the country’s financial and business capital, and it welcomes 40 million tourists a year. It supports a lively arts-and-culture scene that includes museums, galleries, performing arts organizations, festivals (including the pre-eminent Toronto International Film Festival), a diverse restaurant scene and many working artists. It is home to 5 universities and 4 colleges. Toronto’s housing and job market, economic development and population growth have been expanding rapidly over the past decade, and it is recognized as one of the most diverse and multi-cultural cities in the world with 47 percent of the population self-reporting as “part of a visible minority.”
One of the most livable cities in the world, Toronto is ranked as the safest metropolitan area in North America. It has many excellent public schools and a comprehensive public transportation system that includes buses, metros, trolleys, and a public bike program. The city has trendy and up-and-coming neighborhoods while at the same time, there are quiet neighborhoods providing an escape beyond the bustle of downtown. Lake Ontario makes up the southern boundary of the city and provides many kilometers of beautiful, accessible waterfront. The city has many parks, and there are also many recreational opportunities near the city for canoeing, hiking, and outdoor beauty. Toronto is surrounded by Ontario’s Greenbelt, a 2-million-acre area of green space, farmland, forests, wetlands and watersheds that provide multiple farmers’ markets and local food options within easy reach. Niagara Falls is less than 2 hours away and sits adjacent to southern Ontario’s wine-growing region.
By Josh.Fenton
Call for Proposals
A photo-historical seminar for doctoral and post-doctoral scholars, organized and led by Tatjana Bartsch (Bibliotheca Hertziana), Elizabeth Otto (University at Buffalo), Johannes Röll (Bibliotheca Hertziana), and Steffen Siegel (Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen)
Supported by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Stiftung, Essen Rome, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History March 20–24, 2023
Photo-historical research engages a vast array of materials. Scholars working in this field grapple with photographic images of all kinds—from Nicéphore Niépce’s heliographs to the most recent digital imagery. They are attentive to technologies of photographic production and reproduction as well as to the discourses and practices that frame the images. In manifold ways, photo historians can feel lured by the richness of relevant production and tradition. In other words, photography as a medium is not only easily accessed by countless users for many purposes; from a scholarly point of view, it is also a medium that encompasses a mass of researchable resources, a sheer abundance of personal collections and institutional holdings so vast it might even threaten to overwhelm the scholar.
Despite the massive accumulations of diverse material that potentially fall within the purview of histories of photography, such histories can never be considered “completed.” Instead, they are always partial, shaped by researchers’ interests and questions, conscious and unconscious decisions they make and the materials they are able to access. Like the production of photographs themselves, scholars’ work is framed by what Laura Wexler has called a “set of choices” akin to the crops and omissions that delineate the limits of photography’s purported offer of a window into the past. Paradoxically, the most comprehensive photographic collections and archives most clearly reveal not just the excellence of their own holdings, but also the lapses, gaps, exclusions, and oversights within those holdings. Our written approaches to the histories of photography replicate these relationships between what is present and absent, visible and invisible, available and inaccessible, preserved and lost.
These observations are our point of departure for the research seminar titled “Archival Absences: An Incomplete History of Photography.” Following on the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen’s initiative for interdisciplinary seminars on the theory and history of photography—founded with the first seminar in 2019 and, beginning this year, supported by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Stiftung—we are pleased to announce the second such program that invites advanced Ph.D. students and recent post-doctoral scholars to present and discuss their research. With the seminar, we aim to2 develop a focused, multi-disciplinary analysis of the material, institutional, and even personal conditions that shape photo-historical practices of researching, writing, and publishing.
We seek to explore diverse means of knowledge production and methods for probing, mitigating, or bridging archival absences of many kinds. For as much as it is true that photo-historical research can claim an overwhelming opulence of sources, the opposite is always also true: in some cases, the archives’ silences are deafening. We want to delve into the significance of what we do not see, read, and experience, what we do not address, question, and investigate—and the reasons for these absences. We want to query the forces that control the possibility of becoming, being, and remaining present—and, as a corresponding other half of a pendant pair—the power of absence.
Over the past decades, research, especially from feminist and post-colonial perspectives, has offered substantial questions, arguments, and methods for identifying and confronting absences. This research shows the importance of addressing two interrelated lines of questioning: what is missing from the archives, and what is missing in our critical discourses? Drawing on both aspects, we invite applications from emerging scholars who will present new scholarship and, in the context of a week-long seminar, discuss a set of questions that relate to materials and institutions, methods and research fields, canons and historiographies. Among the relevant questions that applicants may wish to consider and that will shape the seminar are:
— What views have photographers captured? What have they missed, and why?
— What logics determine the creation and evolution of archives, analog and digital? How are archives shaped by the epistemic moments of their making, and how do they serve certain histories while betraying others? To what extent do photographers, archivists, or curators rely upon trends, past and present, to shape their photographic inquiries?
— What impacts do disciplinary frames have when it comes to archival care for photo-historical materials and also to scholarly interest? Should we valorize the diverse institutional cultures of presence and absence that prevail in various archives, libraries, and museums?
— How and why do archives select particular materials to collect and thus foster their privileged roles in creating visual histories? How and why do institutions exclude, neglect, or deaccession other materials? What is the impact of objects’ existence in analog or digital formats upon their perceived relevance for scholarly scrutiny?
— Which methods do we pursue when we search the content of an archive? How can we detect, distinguish, and address different types of absences, archival holdings as well as strands of research interests? How do we address the myriad negative spaces that constitute an archive as much as its accessible contents do?
— How do we address the photographic objects, traditions, and indeed entire histories that have been forgotten, damaged, destroyed, suppressed, censored, excluded, vanished, disappeared, or simply lost?
— How do we treat visual objects that, for religious, cultural, or personal reasons, were never intended to be collected or viewed publicly?
— How do we mark the incompleteness of our historiographic work? What theoretical ideas, such as “critical fabulation,” enable us to redress these absences? Can research on archival absences constitute another kind of presence?
— Can photo-historical research practices that address questions of being present or absent serve as role models for other disciplines? Relatedly, how can photo scholars learn from other disciplines grappling with a comparable set of problems?
We welcome proposals from Ph.D. students already in the dissertation phase and recent post-doctoral scholars (maximum of three years since degree) in art history and related disciplines with a strong photo-historical component. The seminar language will be English. All participants will present some aspect of their current research projects, which must relate to the program’s subject matter. Visits to several photographic archives in Rome will be an integral part of the seminar.
The Bibliotheca Hertziana will provide lodging in double rooms and reimburse the incurred expenses for traveling economy class up to 500 euros. In addition, participants will receive a modest daily allowance.
Please upload the following application materials as PDF-documents by October 20, 2022, on https://recruitment.biblhertz.it/position/11042816
— Title and 500-word abstract of the proposed topic (all participants will give a 30-minute formal presentation)
— Brief CV (Maximum 3 pages)
— Brief summary of your dissertation or postdoctoral project
— Names and contact details of two references
Questions and queries may be sent to: fototeca@biblhertz.it
The first seminar was followed by the publication of “Circulating Photographs,” a special issue of History of Photography, vol. 45, issue 1, 2021, co-edited by Antonella Pelizzari and Steffen Siegel: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/thph20/45/1?nav=tocList.
The organizers anticipate selecting a limited number of the 2023 seminar’s final papers for publication in a similar volume.
By Jones
The African Critical Inquiry Programme has named Vanessa Chen, Min’enhle Ncube and Suzana Sousa as recipients of the 2022 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards. Chen, a South African student in the Department of Historical Studies, and Ncube, a Zimbabwean student in Social Anthropology, are both pursuing PhDs at University of Cape Town. Sousa is an Angolan student in History and a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Support from ACIP’s Ivan Karp Awards will allow each of them to do significant research for their dissertations. Chen will work in Dutch archives for her dissertation, Collecting and Convening the Visual and Material Cultural History of Chinese Convicts, Exiles and “Free Blacks” at the Cape (circa 1654-1838). Ncube will conduct fieldwork in Zambia for her project Mapping the Ethics of Care Associated with Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Healthcare Infrastructures in Zambia. Sousa’s award will support her research at Angolan museums for her project “Angola Avante?” Making and Contesting Political Narratives of the Nation through Art and Visual Culture.
Founded in 2012, the African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research at University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University in Atlanta. Supported by donations to the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund, the ACIP fosters thinking and working across public cultural institutions, across disciplines and fields, and across generations. It seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions, and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa through an annual ACIP Workshop and through the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, which support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences enrolled at South African universities.
About Vanessa Chen’s project:
Despite the documentary record of the early history of Chinese convicts, exiles, and ‘free blacks’ at the Cape (1654 – 1838) being fragmentary and scattered in multiple places, it is and should be seen as significant in the making of South Africa’s social history. Researchers have undertaken the task of bringing the stories of this subaltern group to the forefront, however, they have not reckoned with the making of this collection of documentary sources. Collecting and Convening the Visual and Material Cultural History of Chinese Convicts, Exiles, and “Free Blacks” at the Cape (circa 1654-1838) works to do so, and to re-curate these sources as an archive in and of itself. Chen’s dissertation examines the history of the extant documentary archival slivers that speak of Chinese presence at the colony alongside non-documentary materials, tracing and accounting for their presence and absence. She has already worked with archival sources in South Africa, and next will do on-site research at the National Archives of the Netherlands. Her final archival work will be in Indonesia. In the Netherlands, she will locate and collate records for document analyses, consult with archivists regarding the records’ biographies – their movement and reshaping to and from different repositories across time – copyright regulations and accessibility and negotiate permission to digitise and include the records in an eventual digital curation. Chen’s dissertation will enable a more comprehensive understanding of the nature and extent of the Cape Chinese archive, address deficiencies of colonial archiving, and underscore both the importance of representation and what can be made despite of the lack thereof.
About Min’enhle Ncube’s project:
Mapping the Ethics of Care will be the first in-depth ethnographic study on the ethics of care associated with artificial intelligence adopted in healthcare infrastructures in Zambia. Artificial intelligence software is increasingly being adopted to support healthcare infrastructure, raising issues underscored by postcolonial quandaries, neoliberalism from Copperbelt mining, and other developmental paradigms. Through eighteen months of research in Zambia, Ncube will investigate the creation of AI tools, the implications of adopting these into the healthcare infrastructures, and how this contributes towards the ethics of care in the area. The project will examine whether machine learning, its inputs of big data, and software development support or challenge the diversity and inequalities in southern Africa. Ncube’s project is a part of a larger strategic programme, Future Hospitals: 4IR and Ethics of Care in Africa, at the Institute for Humanities in Africa that reflects critically on data and AI’s implications for care infrastructures on the continent. Ncube will use epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2011) as a framework to interrogate technology infrastructures, their epistemology, the fundamentals of ‘intelligence’ and its relevance in a post/neo-colonial landscape of care. With a dearth of literature on ethics associated with AI in the Global South, Ncube’s research addresses this gap in the context of broader anthropological inquiry in Zambia, which includes works from colonial-era and postcolonial Zambia (or Northern Rhodesia). It builds on scholarship regarding the anthropology of ethics and technology while fostering connections with past anthropological work to further the development of anthropology and social science in the region. The research also advances anthropology’s relevance in innovation praxis on the African continent.
About Suzana Sousa’s project:
“Angola Avante?” Making and Contesting Political Narratives of the Nation through Art and Visual Culture is concerned with the nation-building process in Angola after its independence in 1975, a process that occurred through arts and culture. It examines the history of cultural nationalism in the country and the political narrative that has engaged this history to legitimise the nation. This also involves exchanges between politics and visual culture in the context of civil war and the construction of national identity. The process of making the nation was enacted through cultural policy, national arts organisations, and museums that maintained an affinity with colonial ethnography. Sousa engages with the development of visual arts and the making of museums in the aftermath of the civil war. She argues that the policies and practices promoted by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) have continued to be entrenched in colonial categories and distinctions. Her research seeks to understand these complexities and contradictions through fieldwork in two museums in Angola, the Dundo Museum and the National Anthropology Museum. The latter was founded a year after independence in the country’s capital and the former is a colonial enterprise from 1936 located in the east of the country, in an area administered by the mining company Diamang. The museums’ locations, Luanda and Dundo, are also an entry point to the diverse constructions of identity within the nation.
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Information about the 2023 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards for African students enrolled in South African Ph.D. programmes will be available in November 2022. The application deadline is 1 May 2023.
For further information, see http://www.gs.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html and https://www.facebook.com/ivan.karp.corinne.kratz.fund.