Museums in a time of Migration: Rethinking museums roles, representations, collections, and collaborations - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9188168824 ISBN 13: 9789188168825

Verlag: Nordic Academic Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

International migration and mobility have implications for many sectors in society, including the museum sector. To be in tune with the times and relevant to all citizens, the museum sector needs, more than ever, to address issues that transcend national borders. As important educational institutions often visited by, amongst others, schoolchildren, museums have the potential to affect our notions of the world. By making museums places for exploring and learning about both the past and the present of issues such as migration, mobility, transnational connections and human rights, they not only become more relevant as cultural institutions, but may also facilitate positive changes in how people relate to each other in the wider society – thereby ultimately contributing to society’s sustainable development. This book seeks to contribute to the discussion about how museums can improve their engagement in issues of migration and becoming more inclusive.

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Pieter Bevelander is professor of International Migration and Ethnic Relations at the Department of Global political studies and Director of MIM, Malmö Institute of Migration, Diversity and Welfare, Malmö University, Sweden. His main research field is international migration and different aspects of immigrant integration as well the reactions of natives towards immigrants and minorities. He has published widely in international journals and is currently in the editorial board of both the Journal of International Migration and Ethnic Studies and Comparative Migration Studies. He is a member of the Swedish government commission on Migration DELMI, a member of the Executive Board of the IMISCOE network and a board member of the Metropolis network. He has produced reports on migration and integration for several international organizations like the FRA, OECD, IOM and MPI.

Christina Johansson is a senior lecturer in International Migration and Ethnic Relations at Malmö University and was for several years affiliated to the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres in Vienna. She has conducted a research project concerning the collaboration between museums and schools that was funded by the Swedish Research Council. Currently, she is leading another research project on museums as arenas for integration. In addition to her studies of how museums address issues of migration and diversity, she has published extensively on the relations between state, nation, migration policy and the representation of migration.

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Museums in a Time of Migration

Rethinking Museums' Roles, Representations, Collections, and Collaborations

By Christina Johansson, Pieter Bevelander

Nordic Academic Press

Copyright © 2017 Nordic Academic Press and the authors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-91-88168-82-5

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Introduction Christina Johansson & Pieter Bevelander, 
I THE ROLE OF MUSEUMS IN A TIME OF MIGRATION AND SOCIETAL CHANGE, 
1. Creating national and global citizens Peggy Levitt, 
2. Migration and Liverpool David Fleming, 
3. Memory is our weapon Bonita Bennett, 
II REPRESENTING MIGRATION AND ETHNICITY, 
4. Conceptual frameworks Maja Povrzanovic Frykman, 
5. Moving stories Alistair Thomson, 
6. Learning at the museum Christina Johansson, 
III RETHINKING MUSEUM COLLECTIONS AND DOCUMENTATION, 
7. From totality to infinity Fredrik Svanberg, 
8. The making of cultural heritage and ethnicity in the archive Malin Thor Tureby & Jesper Johansson, 
9. The future is ours Dragan Nikolic, 
IV COLLABORATION AND INCLUSION IN THE MUSEUM SECTOR, 
10. Migrants, museums, and tackling the legacies of prejudice Bernadette Lynch, 
11. Women making herstory Parvin Ardalan, 
About the authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Creating national and global citizens

What role can museums play?

Peggy Levitt

A world on the move

You only have to walk down the street in any immigrant neighbourhood — Washington Heights in New York City, Kreuzberg in Berlin, or the Bijlmer in Amsterdam — to realize that big changes are underfoot. No doubt many of the businesses you pass will have to do with migrants' homelands, be they travel agencies; ethnic shops selling sorely missed fruit and veg, phonecards, and DVDs; or shops where people can transfer money to relatives back home. This is because more and more people continue to vote, pray, and invest in businesses in the places they come from at the same time as they buy homes, open shops, and join parent–teacher associations in the countries where they settle. Putting down roots in your adoptive homeland while continuing to remain active in the economy and politics of the country of your birth is not just for poor or working-class migrants. Think of the many highly educated, highly skilled professionals that populate the boardrooms and bedrooms of the world's cities and suburbs. Increasingly, they too buy homes, raise their children, vote, and invest across borders.

As a matter of fact, one out of every seven people in the world today is a migrant and these individuals send a great deal of money back home. According to World Bank projections, international migrants were expected to remit more than $550 billion in earnings in 2013, $414 billion of it to developing countries. In twenty-four countries, remittances were equal to more than 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2011; in nine countries they were equal to more than 20 per cent of GDP. In countries such as Mexico or Morocco, these contributions are one of the principal sources of foreign currency, and governments — now dependent on remittances — want to make sure the money keeps flowing. Migrants are also a tremendous source of ideas, know-how, and skills, and some governments try to systematically harvest these social remittances as well (Levitt 2001). To keep migrants close, they offer tax and investment incentives, allow dual citizenship and encourage expatriates to vote, or even create special passport queues at airports for 'returning' emigrants. To keep money coming, they put programmes in place to boost migrants' contributions to development.

These high levels of movement have created what some call 'superdiverse' cities, a term first coined to capture changing migration patterns in Europe (Vertovec 2012; Wessendorf 2013). Initially, most migrants hailed from a relatively small group of countries (the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean in the case of Britain) and shared a religion and language. Over the past decades, however, the large numbers of asylum seekers, international students, and labour and professional migrants moving to the continent came from a much wider range of places, faiths, and language groups, and had very different immigration statuses. A metropolis such as London has residents from as many as 184 nationalities, with 300 first languages spoken in state-run schools (Spencer 2012). How people answer the question 'Who are you?' is complicated. They say 'I'm Jamaican and American' or 'I'm Anglo-Indian' at the same time as they say they are Londoners or New Yorkers. They may announce that they are Muslim, or a professor, or an environmentalist, thereby staking claim to a place by virtue of their sense of membership in a religious, professional, or activist tribe.

For migrants with the requisite language skills, education, and social and cultural capital, living in multiple worlds can produce tremendous rewards. Many low-skilled migrants, without languages and with little education, are forced to move because they cannot gain a secure economic foothold, whether in the country they left or where they are trying to settle. Either way, today's migrants are moving in a world of economic crisis, neoliberal restructuring, precarious jobs, and major cutbacks in social welfare.

These dynamics challenge the basic assumptions about how and where inequality is produced, family life is lived, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship actually get exercised. New social safety nets are needed to respond to greater mobility and the multiple allegiances people embrace, based on a different set of assumptions about how livelihoods and social security should be organized, and who the winners and losers should be. But first, we need a different vocabulary that allows us to articulate a different understanding of the nation that does not necessarily stop at its geographic borders (see also Maja Povrzanovic Frykman's contribution elsewhere in this volume). We need new ways of understanding identities that are not based on a zero-sum game — that ever more people will identify with several groups at once, their relative importance changing over time. We need new tools that help instil the willingness and skills to engage with difference across the world and across the street.

That is where museums come in. They are one of many messy arenas where these aspirations, skills, and political projects can take shape and where we might make sense of the relationship between people and culture on the move (Karp & Kraemer 1992; Kratz 2011; Macdonald 2003). Museums, in the past, helped create national citizens, so my question is, in today's global world, are they creating global citizens too? How and when are they helping create successful, diverse communities by inspiring an openness to difference across the world and next door? What is it about particular cities that helps explain the answer? What do we learn about nationalism by looking at a country's cultural institutions?

To see how this happens, if at all, I visited a variety of museums around the world, including museums of art, ethnography, and cultural history, and constituency or community museums dedicated to the experiences of particular groups. What I found, as described in my recent book Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (2015), is based on 183 first-hand conversations with museum directors, curators, and policymakers, their descriptions of current and future exhibits, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Nordic Academic Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 9188168824
• ISBN 13: 9789188168825
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Herausgeber: Johansson Christina, Bevelander Pieter
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar