Ciclo: Archivos, investigación y patrimonio científico: una mirada desde la historia de las ciencias

Coordinado por Francesca Antonelli, Luz Narbona y Ximo Guillem, en colaboración con la Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i la Tècnica.

4 de diciembre 2024 – 10:30 Online

Weaving worlds: archives, science, and the politics of colonial museums

Mike Jones (University of Tasmania)

Zoom: https://uv-es.zoom.us/j/92027371561

Abstract

For much of their history, large colonial museums have been seen as ‘cathedrals of science,’ designed to expand human understanding and educate the public. In addition to specimens and artefacts, such work relies on disciplinary expertise, access to published sources, and extensive archival records, including registers, research files, fieldnotes, illustrations, photographs, and correspondence with international networks of collectors. While these accumulated resources were once a source of institutional authority and power, recent decades have seen museums become contested spaces, and their diverse collections have been used to support more relational, polyvocal, participatory, and context-specific ways of working. In this paper, Dr Mike Jones will outline the changing politics of museum collections and archives, with a particular focus on Australian ethnographic and anthropological collections. He will highlight the complex interplay of stories and systems of knowledge found in museums and their archives, and explore how more distributed, relational approaches to collections, authority, and ethics can support communities to weave together different perspectives on the world.

Bio

Dr Mike Jones is an archivist, historian, and collections consultant with more than 15 years of experience working with the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) on digital, archival, and public history projects. Mike's interdisciplinary research explores the history of archives and museums, and the ways in which collections-based knowledge is documented, managed, exhibited, and accessed. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow—Indigenous and Colonial Histories at the University of Tasmania and is involved in several collaborative projects with First Nations communities, museum professionals, archivists, and academics. His first book, Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum, was published by Routledge in 2021.