History Should Make You Uncomfortable
First Annual Fall Symposium
Now, more than ever, it is important that underrepresented topics and histories are highlighted. Our Fall symposium seeks to share scholarship and promote discourse on objects and history that have been previously overlooked often because they were deemed “uncomfortable.”
When: November 21st, 2020
Where: Zoom Webinar
Time: 10:00am - 3:00pm EST
A special thank you to our Symposium Committee members, Victoria Moore, Peri Buch, and Sarah Henzlik. Without their continued support and efforts, we would not have been able to make this symposium a reality.
Symposium Call for Papers
History Should Make You Uncomfortable
Symposium Date: November 21, 2020 (via Zoom)
On behalf of the Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, the editorial board is circulating a call for papers for their November 2020 online symposium entitled, History should make you uncomfortable. Now more than ever, it is important that underrepresented topics and histories are highlighted. Our symposium seeks to share scholarship and promote discourse on objects and history that have been previously overlooked often because they were deemed ‘uncomfortable’. By discussing ‘uncomfortable’ histories through the lens of material culture, we can help to decolonize and deconstruct histories and narratives that may be harmful, inaccurate, or misrepresented.
CMSMC welcomes papers discussing Material Culture grounded in historical, archaeological, art historical, and/or museum studies approaches. We are drawing from various types of works, including works in progress, book chapters, interdisciplinary approaches, and more. Proposals for the symposium will be accepted until November 1, 2020.
Submission Guidelines
In order to submit a proposal to CMSMC, you will need to provide an abstract (up to 350 words) as well as a partial bibliography, and CV. Please email these materials to admin@cmsmc.org, with a subject line that reads as follows “last name_submission_symposium.” All submissions must be cited in the Chicago Manual of Style. Your submissions will be responded to once they are reviewed by a member of our team. Should your paper be accepted, you will be contacted by the head of our Symposium committee, who will discuss logistics with you.
Criteria
All pieces for the 2020 symposium must revolve around the theme History should make you uncomfortable. The presentation must be 15 minutes with visuals, which is roughly a 2,500-2,800 word piece (or 10 pages double spaced).
Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
Display and Collections/ Collecting Histories, problematizing Indigenous objects in the Western collection; repatriation/restitution cases; looting and/or the black market; reframing collecting through colonial lens; provenance work.
Decolonization, Problematizing “isms;” tangible culture of slavery; problematizing notions of “discovery” or “lost cities;” cartography and colonialism; problematizing naturalism and visual culture; Orientalism.
Environment(alism), deconstructing the sublime/picturesque in landscape; eco-(art) history; materiality of climate change; first farmers to first cities
Gender and Sexuality, sex in the historical record; complicating the materiality of gender in the museum space; visualizing Queerness.
Politics, (re)thinking art and policy; complicating political portraits/ monuments.
Race, visualizations of racism/race; engaging indigeneity through object studies; racial empowerment through material culture;
Religion/Culture, complicating religiosity; recentering religious objects in museum spaces; legality and cultural heritage; the sacred and the profane inhabiting the same space; Christianity as politic.