Conference: Exhibiting Europe
Oslo, Norway | Interkulturelt Museum
Exhibiting Europe. The Development of European narratives in museums, collections, and exhibitions
Europe is more than the EU. However, without the evolution of the present-day EU there would not be the same extensive literature on subjects like Europeanization, conceptualizing cultural processes in the framework of the political and economic integration; on ‘building Europe’, comparing integration critically to nation-building processes of the nineteenth century; or even on European cosmopolitism, contextualizing the same process in the light of European modernity. Especially the disciplines of Social Anthropology, Cultural and Museum Studies and Contemporary History have identified the ongoing and contested Europeanization as an important field of analysis.
This conference aims to bring these disciplines together, linking research on processes of integration, musealisation and Europeanization. Any museum representing the history and histories of European integration has the inherent potential to be an important forum for defining a common European heritage and Europeanness not as a national, but as a trans- and supranational culture and identity. The conference will therefore ask if and how discourses on Europeanization are put on display. How do they manifest themselves in permanent and temporary exhibitions? How do they affect the planning of new museums or transform the policies of existing ones? Hence, the economic, political and cultural integration processes largely driven by the European Union will be addressed from three complementary academic perspectives at the conference in Oslo in April 2011. Structured in three panels – ‘Centre and Periphery’, ‘Biographies’ and ‘Objects and Collections’ – this conference will bring together experts from all over Europe and explore the ongoing production of a European narrative and heritage in the museal field.
Promoted by:
Exhibiting Europe is a research project financed by the Research Council of Norway hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in collaboration with the Institute for European Ethnology of the Humboldt University and the Centre for European and International Studies Research of the University of Portsmouth.