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Resilience & Memory in Archives, Libraries, and Museums

Resilience & Memory in Archives, Libraries, and Museums

All sessions will be conducted via webinar. Advance registration will be required. For more information or to be added to the event list, please email ias@indiana.edu.

Resilience & Memory in Archives, Libraries, and Museums is presented in affiliation with Themester, a program of IU Bloomington’s College of Arts and Sciences. IU’s Institute for Advanced Study gratefully acknowledges Themester’s financial support of Dr. Carolyn Smith’s and Dr. Emily Buhrow Rogers’ participation in this lecture series. We also appreciate event co-sponsorship by the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center, the IU Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, and the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory.

Resilience, Climate, and Species: Perspectives from Deep Time

Wednesday, September 15, 2021, 1:30 p.m.
Dr. P. David Polly

Dr. P. David Polly is Professor and Chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at IUB and a Faculty Research Curator of the IU Paleontology Collection. He will discuss what research with fossils and related data can teach us about topics such as resilience of life in deep time and recovery from extinction, as well as 21st century resilience of ecosystems in Indiana. He will also address issues relating to the resilience of the fossils themselves and other data on which such research is based, including issues with collections preservation.

The World in Your Hand: Exhibiting the Global Stories of Cellular Technology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History

Wednesday, October 6, 2021, 1:00 p.m.
Dr. Joshua A. Bell

Dr. Joshua A. Bell is Curator of Globalization and Acting Director of the National Anthropological Archives. He will discuss his collaborative research into the social realities of cellphone technology and his forthcoming exhibit, Cellphone: Unseen Connections, which examines the ecological, material, social, and cultural realities of our devices. The exhibit considers the elements and minerals needed to build our devices and their various supply chains, cellular infrastructure, cultural diversity enabled by this technology, issues around sustainability of cellular technology, and the social implications of this technology.

*This event is co-sponsored by the IU Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology.

Weaving as Cultural and Environmental Resilience

Monday, November 15, 2021, 1:00 p.m.
Dr. Carolyn Smith and Dr. Emily Buhrow Rogers, in conversation with Dr. Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe

Dr. Carolyn Smith, Da'luk Youth Program Coordinator at the Northern California Indian Development Council, and Dr. Emily Buhrow Rogers, ACLS Leading Edge Fellow at the Smithsonian's Center for Folklore and Cultural Heritage, will discuss cultural resilience in the face of environmental crises and using indigenous knowledge to bolster environmental resilience. Smith and Buhrow Rogers have documented changes in traditional basket-weaving practices and materials necessitated by environmental threats such as climate change and wildfires.

*This event is co-sponsored by the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center and the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory.

Conversation with Students: Dr. Smith and Dr. Buhrow Rogers

Monday, November 15, 2021, 3:30 p.m.
Dr. Carolyn Smith and Dr. Emily Buhrow Rogers

An informal opportunity for students to converse with Dr. Carolyn Smith and Dr. Emily Buhrow Rogers via Zoom. (See above for related talk at 1 p.m. on Monday, 11/15/21.) See some of their work relating to environmental and cultural resilience in a recent Smithsonian publication found here: https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/crisis-carolyn-smith-weaving-pandemic-wildfire.

Carolyn Smith (member-descendent of the Karuk tribe) holds a PhD in Anthropology from UC, Berkeley and is the Da'luk Youth Program Coordinator at the Northern California Indian Development Council (NCIDC). Prior to taking this position, she was the 2018-2020 Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC, Berkeley and Executive Director for the California Indian Basketweavers Association. Dr. Smith is a traditional basketweaver and artist as well as an active researcher. Her research engages with indigenous knowledge to consider how basketry is profoundly intertwined with people, language, and the environment. She is a member of the UC Berkeley Native American Advisory Council, the newly-formed California Indian Studies Scholar Association, board member for the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center, and co-founder of the High Ground Arts Center.

Emily Buhrow Rogers holds a PhD in Anthropology from IU Bloomington and is an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow at the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She is the curator and editor of “Chronicling Culture in Crisis,” a special series of Folklife Magazine dedicated to documenting how tradition bearers are being affected by the pandemic. She is also a co-founder of the High Ground Arts Center, an open access, web-based exhibition space devoted to presenting Native American craftspeople's works and ways of knowing. The Center will serve as a platform for indigenous voices and will support and promote the works of Native artists.

*This event is co-sponsored by the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center and the Material Culture and Heritage Studies Laboratory.

Identifying Changes in the Wabash River Corridor's Vascular Plant Flora

Friday, December 3, 2021, 11 a.m.
Rich Hull, IU Herbarium

Rich Hull, graduate student in the IUB Department of Biology, will discuss the herbarium and its usefulness in research, such as documentation of resilience and change in plant species. He will introduce attendees to the breadth of the IU Herbarium collection and share the preliminary results of a project that seeks to establish how the vascular plant flora of the Wabash River corridor has changed over the past century.

Plant Photographic Scavenger Hunt: Enhancing the IU Herbarium Digital Archive

Wednesday, January 26, 1 p.m.
Paul Rothrock, IU Herbarium

Since 1885, the IU Herbarium, as a repository for preserved plant materials, has served a traditional role of supporting biological research. These materials may be borrowed through sister herbaria or studied by in person visits by scholars and the general public. Thanks to technological advances in the past 20 years, 21st century herbaria are providing digital archives through the Symbiota web platform that may be accessed remotely and by a wider audience. This expansive information system is accompanied by a range of tools that transform the herbarium, especially for the citizen scientist. Conversely, the digital archive creates opportunities for engaging the citizen scientist in new ways.

In 2021 a plant photographic scavenger hunt was organized whose goal was to acquire quality field photos and draw upon the broad community of plant enthusiasts and professionals throughout Indiana. Submitted photos would enhance the Symbiota species pages, novel identification tool, and glossary. This webinar will review the history of the IU Herbarium, especially its successful digitization effort, and demonstrate several important Symbiota tools. It will describe the organization of the scavenger hunt and report on its successes and pitfalls. Building upon the experience and results of 2021, a final complementary hunt is anticipated during 2022.

This talk is co-sponsored by the IU Herbarium.

How NOT to Get A-head in Anthropology: Anthropological Face Casts and Ongoing Issues of Ambiguity, Memory, and Resilience

Friday, February 11, 1:30 p.m.
Gwyneira Issac, Smithsonian Institution

Anthropologically informed plaster face casts were produced in the 19th and 20th centuries as part of an effort to develop human typologies, and to acquire data on what were perceived to be the morphological attributes of race. Their subsequent affective, politically sensitive, promiscuously mobile, and precarious qualities have resulted in them occupying highly charged territories within collections, as well as between museums and descendant communities. They are objects with inherent ambiguities due to how they exist at the intersections of art and science, merging individual, cultural, political, and colonialized bodies. Casts also provide tangible traces of unwanted physical intimacy resulting from how colonized peoples often had no choice in being cast or handled by strangers. In recent years, however, they have also been used by descendent communities as memorials of family members. This article explores this potent intersection of ambiguity and intimacy that these casts occupy, arguing for an ethical protocol for their treatment that acknowledges their history, colonial contexts, and the processes behind their creation, as well as their current legacies, facets of resilience, as well as their re-socialization through renewed relationships with descendant communities.

This talk is co-sponsored by the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.