Special Feature: "Decolonizing Museums in Practice - Part 1 (Legacies & Futures)

In this two-part special feature we think with the Museum Ethnographer's Group conference "Decolonizing the Museum in Practice", held in April of this year. The first part focuses on the legacies and futures of ethnographic museums and features interviews with Faye Belsey, Laura Van Broekhoven, and Rachael Minott. Together, these conversations ask us: what does decolonization look like in practice, how can injustices past and present be addressed by museum professionals, and by what means might we better balance power and access between museum staff and diverse stakeholders? Hosted by Deborah Thomas and with interviews conducted by Chris and Cassandra Green, this two-part series on “decolonizing museums” examines the past, present, and future(s) of museum practice. Given often sordid collection histories and the strained at best or non-existent at worst relations that museums have had with communities of origin, these interviews address how we might face head-on the legacies of colonialism and empire. Full episode transcript.  Image Caption: The central gallery of the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, UK. View from the upper mezzanine showing the gallery length-wise. The many glass cases containing artifacts from all over the world on and around the ground floor are clearly visible, while two people look on in the lower foreground. Credits:  Introduction/Conclusion: Deborah Thomas  Interviewers: Chris Green Recorder: Cassandra Green  Producers: Kyle Olson and Nooshin Sadegh-Samimi  Assistant Producer: Chris Green  Featured Audio: Gingee - "Decolonize your Mind"  "Brooklyn Museum Hires White Curator of African Art, Horace Cooper Responds to Backlash" Now This Video - "Why We Need to Decolonize the Brooklyn Museum" Decolonize This Place - "Anti-Columbus Day: Decolonize This Museum"

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Anthropological Airwaves is the official podcast of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. It is a venue for highlighting the polyphony of voices across the discipline’s four fields and the infinite—and often overlapping—subfields within them. Through conversations, experiments in sonic ethnography, ethnographic journalism, and other (primarily but not exclusively) aural formats, Anthropological Airwaves endeavors to explore the conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical issues that shape anthropology’s past, present, and future; experiment with new ways of conversing, listening, and asking questions; and collaboratively and collectively push the boundaries of what constitutes anthropological knowledge production. Anthropological Airwaves shares the journal’s commitment to advancing research on the archaeological, biological, linguistic, and sociocultural aspects of the human experience by featuring the work of those who study and practice anthropology within and beyond the academy.