The H-Net Network on Material Culture and Vernacular Landscapes and Artifact Preservation will promote and support the study of objects, buildings, sites, structures, landscapes and other material cultural productions as part of the visual record of life.
We welcome announcements, CFP's, queries, contributions, and discussions of all things material! To add yours, click the orange "Start a Discussion" button above this text.
We also welcome totally new projects. If you have an idea for a new on-going feature or a one time resource for the field, let us know. We are barely scratching the surface of what this website can do and we have a great staff of tech-minded folks at H-Net. If you've got a grand idea, we have people who can help make it happen. Podcasts? Video tours? Image galleries? Digitization projects? We can do those, and more! There are a few thoughts here, but the internet's the limit. Let us know what you're thinking.
And we tweet, too! https://twitter.com/H_Mat_Culture
You can see Recent Queries and Recent Discussions below, and Recent Announcements at the bottom of the page below the scrolling "Occasional Objects" images. All CFP's posted to the site can be found in the links on the right, as can Jobs in Material Culture Studies.
Hi,
I would recommend a book called "Religious Objects in Museums" by Crispin Paine. It deals specifically with all the issues surrounding the public display of religious objects, but it also covers the relationship between those objects and the religions they're associated with.
Hi Mark - what an interesting project! Here are a few suggestions:
1) Yasser Elsheshtawy has a chapter in "The Evolving Arab City" about how Abu Dhabi, UAE has had similar struggles with public art. Citation here: Elsheshtawy, Y. (2008). “Cities of Sand & Fog: The Emergence of Abu Dhabi as a Global City.” In Y. Elsheshtawy (ed.). The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, modernity & urban development. London: Routledge.
Dear friends,
I am currently working with community partners in Newark to develop an exhibition and public programming on Kea Tawana's Ark, a three-story boat-like structure built and dismantled in Newark in the 1980s. You can see some great photos of the Ark here: http://www.spacesarchives.org/explore/collection/environment/keas-ark/
Dr. Jon Kay--Director of Traditional Arts Indiana and Curator of Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures has been active in producing material culture podcasts. His series Artisan Ancestors has 40 episodes (so far) on a wide range of material culture topics. It can be found in iTunes and at the Internet Archive. He has recently begun hosting the Mathers Museum of World Culture's own podcast series Conversations on Culture. With students associated with Traditional Arts Indiana he has also produced a foodways podcast called Second-Servings.
The podcasts from my neck of the woods of which I'm aware, are of talks from seminars and conferences versus being episodic, if you're also seeking those.
I would recommend adding both "99% Invisible", which is an exploration of the built environment and design in general, and "The Memory Palace" which often uses material culture as a jumping off point for an exploration of an idea or historical event. I have used episodes of both of these to teach introductory historic preservation class to help students understand not only the interpretation of material culture, but also the concept of multiple layers of interpretation at any given site.
Hi folks,
A good article by Russell Jacoby of the dangers of Material Culture Studies in the Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Object-as-Subject/229587/
The scrolling images to left are from H-Material-Culture's "Occasional Objects" series--a periodic informal examination of objects sent in by our subscribers. View the full collection, read the essays, and add your contribution here in Occasional Objects.
Dear Network Subscribers,
H-Material Culture seeks additional editors to fill the following roles:
The next 8th, 9th and 10th of April it will take place at the University of Santiago de Compostela the international conference "The Epoch of Space. State and New Perspectives", where researchers from around the world will meet to discuss the spatial turn of humanities.
The following jobs were posted to the H-Net Job Guide to 11 March 2019. These job postings are included here based on the categories selected by the list editors for H-Material-Culture. See the H-Net Job Guide website at
http://www.h-net.org/jobs/ for more information. To contact the Job Guide,
write to jobguide@mail.h-net.msu.edu, or call +1-517-432-5134 between 9 am and 5 pm US Eastern time.
ANTHROPOLOGY
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, now in its 26th year of operation, is seeking proposals from academic institutions to serve as its administrative host beginning on January 1, 2020 or as negotiated in partnership with the selected institution. Details can be found here: https://networks.h-net.org/hnet-rfp
Registration is now open for the Collections in Circulation conference organised by the AHRC Mobile Museum project which will take place at Kew Gardens, London, UK on Thursday 9th and Friday 10th May 2019.
Full details of the programme, abstracts and biographies of all speakers are now available on the project website at https://royalholloway.ac.uk/mobilemuseum/conference.
The King’s College London Memory Group is pleased to invite you to the Museums a
8.1 Gentrification and Heritage Conservation Change Over Time is pleased to announce the launch of issue 8.1 Gentrification and Heritage Conservation. This issue provides a valuable contribution to a more rigorous discourse and, we hope, constructive action regarding the gentrification/conservation intersection. Through various lenses of policy, history, climate change, and community development the articles in this issue critically examine conservation as an agent of neighborhood change. |
Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
The MUA is proud to announce the creation of our Small Boat Recording Lab. Thanks to the generous support of the site's viewers and the Coastal Heritage Society, the MUA now has four small boats available for students and researchers to study. These boats will immediately be used by students at Georgia Southern University to learn documentation techniques but all university programs are welcome to make use of this collection.
