Special Feature: "Decolonizing Museums in Practice" - Part 3 (Feat. Wayne Modest)

In this follow-up to our two-part special feature on the 2018 Museum Ethnographer's Group conference "Decolonizing the Museum in Practice", held in April of last year we interview Dr. Wayne Modest, director of the Research Center for Material Culture. Hosted by Deborah Thomas and interviewed by Chris Green, Dr. Modest shares with us his thoughts on decolonizing as an ongoing commitment. He emphasizes the great responsibility that curators have to the people, past and present, who are represented in museum collections. In his view, museum research and curation must always be public-facing and must commit to working together with those whose lives are most precarious in the afterlives of colonialism and empire.  Episode Transcript Image Credit. For educational purposes only.  Image Caption: The central atrium of the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. Straight-view of the barrel-vaulted space from the middle of the room, oriented length-wise with the central staircase in the background. Gallery spaces are visible along top level above the stairs and light streams in from a glass-and-steel half-cylindrical dome at the top.  Credits:  Introduction: Deborah Thomas  Interviewer: Chris Green  Recorder: Kyle Olson  Producer: Kyle Olson Featured Audio: KOKOROKO -  "Abusey Junction // We Out Here" Bob Marley and the Wailers - "War"

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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.