Rising From the Rubble: Creating the Museum of the History of Polish Jews

The Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Lecture in Judaic Studies… Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor of Performance Studies, NYU and Program Director, Core Exhibition, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1298/thumbnail.jp

Vernacular museum: communal bonding and ritual memory transfer among displaced communities

Eclectically curated and largely ignored by the mainstream museum sector, vernacular museums sit at the interstices between the nostalgic and the future-oriented, the private and the public, the personal and the communal. Eluding the danger of becoming trivialised or commercialised, they serve as powerful conduits of memory, which strengthen communal bonds in the face of the ‘flattening’ effects of globalisation. The museum this paper deals with, a vernacular museum in Vanjärvi in southern Finland, differs from the dominant type of the house museum, which celebrates masculinity and social elites. Rather, it aligns itself with the small amateur museums of everyday life called by Angela Jannelli Wild Museums (2012), by analogy with Lévi-Strauss’ concept of ‘pensée sauvage’. The paper argues that, despite the present-day flurry of technologies of remembering and lavishly funded memory institutions, there is no doubt that the seemingly ‘ephemeral’ institutions such as the vernacular museum, dependent so much on performance, oral storytelling, living bodies and intimate interaction, nevertheless play an important role in maintaining and invigorating memory communities

Integrating Western and non-Western cultural expressions to further cultural and creative tourism: a case study

The term cultural industries was coined more than half a century ago, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the broader concept of creative industries, covering a wide range of cultural, design and digital activity, captured the imagination of public policymakers at national and city levels. Paralleling these developments has been the recognition of the phenomenon of cultural tourism and, more recently, the emergence of the idea of creative tourism, that is, tourism programmes designed to engage tourists actively in cultural activity. This paper presents a case study of a creative tourism event which took place in 2012 in the City of Manchester in the UK. The festival, which celebrated West African culture, utilised existing cultural institutions of the city and drew on the talents of local and visiting members of West African community to engage not only tourists but also indigenous and Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) residents of Manchester in a variety of cultural activities. It thus used the focus of creative tourism to seek to foster community and cultural development as well as tourism

Picturing the nation : The Celtic periphery as discursive other in the archaeological displays of the museum of Scotland

Using the archaeological displays at the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, this paper examines the exhibition as a site of identity creation through the negotiations between categories of same and Other. Through an analysis of the poetics of display, the paper argues that the exhibition constructs a particular relationship between the Celtic Fringe and Scottish National identity that draws upon the historical discourses of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland as a place and a time \u27apart\u27. This will be shown to have implications for the display of archaeological material in museums but also for contemporary understandings of Scottish National identity. <br /