No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
The articles published in this Fall 2011 issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge were presented at a conference on and Migration held on June 25-26, 2010, at the Mai son des Science de l'Homme (MSH) in Paris. We were able to organize this event thanks to the support of MSH Director and President of the International Sociological Association, Michel Wieviorka. He encouraged us from the beginning to organize an international conference on this topic. This publication is the result of his strong support to our project for which we are very grateful. When we started to organize this event, we were surprised by the fact that there is not much done in academic circles on this topic. There is an industry of publications about migration and another industry about museums. What we found was a scarcity on publications that link the two topics. Although there are some seminal works in the field of Museum Studies and in the field of International Migration, there is not much done in terms of research, publications and events related to the link between migration and museums. This collection is the first one of its kind presenting a broad comparative perspective on museums and It focuses fundamentally on Europe but includes articles on Australia and the USA as well. Most of the contributors are specialist on international The focus of the present collection is on questions of representation and social agency of both migrants and museum officials. We want to explore in a comparative perspective the complex and conflictive articulation between how migrants are represented by themselves and by museum institutions. The topic of migrants as social actors is one of the key issues explored in this collection. Migrants are not passive toward their lives and representations. They are social agents actively involved in their communities and socially vigilant of the way they are treated, perceived and represented by the host society. They produce also their own narratives and representations that are many times in conflict with Western hegemonic perceptions of their cultures and identities. Their strong presence in global cities and metropolitan societies today confronts the dominant society with issues of racial/ethnic discrimination and historical memory otherwise ignored by the hegemonic views in the mainstream of Western societies. Museums dealing with the history of slavery, the history of migration and the colonial history emerged as spaces of contestation. Moreover, the term itself has been contested by minority groups that happen to have a long colonial history in the metropolitan society and are today formal metropolitan citizens born and raised in the metropoles but still perceived as foreigners and immigrants. Questions of identity are inevitable in these debates. Who belongs and who does not belong are crucial questions and the boundaries defining them are related to the foundational myths of the nation as well as problems of racism. As part of the challenges posed to national identity by migration, Andrea Meza Torres does a comparison between Paris and Berlin in terms of what she calls the museumization of migration. She compares two migration museums: the Cite nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration in Paris and the experience of migrant representation in Berlin. Her article documents how both locations served to link with the immigrant communities and to stage a transformed revival of the colonial heritage. She addresses issues of representation of migrants in relation to each country's national identity. Similarly, Lia P. Rodrigues analyzes the Danish Immigration Museum (DIM) in relation to Danish national identity discourses. Her article shows the blind spots and forgetfulness of Danish national identity. The DIM itself is a space that highlights this historical amnesia. Colonial subjects and some immigrants of color are not represented in the museum. …
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.