Postdoctoral Fellowship: Call for Applicants – Thinking Through the Museum (Concordia University, Montreal)
Thinking Through the Museum: A Partnership Approach to Curating Difficult Knowledge in Public (TTTM) is an international, interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral research network integrating scholars, museum professionals, and community members with partner organizations in Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, and South Africa, countries grappling with difficult legacies. Our goal is to explore how Indigenous resurgence, intersectionality, and new theories of memory, materiality, and emotion can better illuminate the entangled legacies of mass violence and reinvigorate the field of museology with new ideas and tools. Thirty years after the call for new, critical museology (Pearce 1989; Vergo 1989), and in a moment of global urgency regarding injustice, what progress has been made? What mechanisms exist to transcend institutional blinders and share tools across the academy-museum-community divide? Can new social theory improve on first wave change, whose approach to ‘inclusion’ added new voices but maintained identity silos and Western humanist ideas of personhood?
Our practice-based methodology fosters sustained dialogue, inquiry, and creation to bridge academy-museum-community divides in novel ways. The partnership’s objective is to transform how academics and community representatives engage with museums in order to help societies heal from colonialism, genocide, violence and oppression. To resist dangerous trends of social polarization, and in response to Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, #MeToo, and the refugee and climate crises, museums world-wide must decolonize, democratize, and apply their unique tools to lead crucial public dialogues on culture, society, history, and humanity.
TTTM is advertising for a postdoctoral researcher (2 years, full time) to join the National Heritage & Traumatic Memory (NHTM) research cluster. NHTM explores how arts-based practices can help circumvent institutional constraints and engage communities via non-traditional sites and performative modes of display and participation. Working primarily in Poland, NHTM considers how histories of colonialism, the Holocaust, and communism meet, and develops forms of reflection, redress, and repair to address this geographical region’s violently-lost historical diversity. NHTM develops context-sensitive concepts and tools to expand critical museology’s Western-centrism, and collaborates across clusters to develop minority artist residencies, a comparative genocide workshop with the National Museum of the American Indian and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and other resources to engage Poland’s marginalized Jewish, Roma, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, African-diaspora, LGBTQ+ and refugee communities under an increasingly authoritarian government. We are particularly interested in candidates whose research is comparative and transnational (e.g. a comparative study of Holocaust and Settler Colonial genocide memory). We are willing to consider any research proposal that addresses the working group’s wider remit.
The postdoctoral fellow position is full-time, 40 hours per week from September 2024-August 2026.
Responsibilities include:
- Conduct ethnographic and archival research in your designated area of research
- Publish articles in international journals and/or book chapters for volumes edited by the project team
- Present research findings at selected academic conferences
- Contribute to the planning and organization of project conferences and events
- Contribute to the overall development of TTTM and its public outreach programmes
- Actively participate in the NHTM cluster, including attending its bi-monthly Zoom meetings
Click here for complete information and application details. Apply by November 1.
