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Call for applications, Doctoral Winter School in Urban Anthropology, Heritage-making, Uses and Museumification of the Past in Relationship to Nation-building, Iziko Museums of South Africa, Cape Town (July 27th - August 9th, 2017), DL: April 15th.
The process of heritage-making in the context of a nation (re)building is multifaceted. In periods of historical transition, challenges are many and the fragility of the political context is fertile ground for revisiting the representation of the past. To understand these processes, an interdisciplinary engagement with contributions from history, anthropology, archeology, political science, art history and museology is necessary. Interdisciplinary collaboration, however, is not always easy to establish within the existing research institutional framework, built around separate disciplines. The main goal of this winter school is to create a doctoral training space and interdisciplinary exchange between researchers working on heritage- making process, uses and "museumification" of the past in connection with nation-building, or, more broadly, the construction of identities.
The South African context is particularly rich and provides complex terrains for considering these issues as “a post-conflict zone whose relationships with the past and sites of memory and trauma are being closely scrutinized” (Meskell, 2012). Whilst Western Europe has long been considered as the laboratory of modern heritage practices, and Germany in particular as a fundamental example for the study of Geschichtsbeweltigung, recent historiography has shown to what an extent South Africa has become in the last decades the site of innovative theoretical approaches and practices (e.g. Nuttall and Coetzee 1998, Davison 1998, 2005, Legassick and Rassool 2000, Coombes 2003, Lalu 2009, Meskell 2011, Esterhuysen 2012, Hamilton et al. 2012, Hamilton and Skotnes 2015, Peterson, Gavua and Rassool 2015, to give just some examples) that are breaking new ground in finding ways of coming to terms with difficult pasts, questioning fundamental issues of authority and representation.
The winter school takes the form of specialized training in social science research, developed in collaboration with different institutional partners, scholars, artists and curators working on colonial archives, collections and memories. The first edition was held in Istanbul, at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies (IFEA) (June-July 2016), the next edition will be held in Cape Town (July - August 2017) and the third one is planned to take place in Cotonou and Porto-Novo (2018).
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