IN-PERSON: Prague – Section A
Abstract
We created the Citizen Curator Project to encourage community engagement with social issues by recruiting members of local organizations to work with museums and archives to curate exhibits with the materials in their collections. Our goal was to open local history collections, explore cultural heritage, and promote public discourse and civic engagement by providing an outlet for the exploration and expression of ideas about issues such as civil rights, climate change, identity, and public health. We hoped that citizen-curated exhibits would give voice specifically to marginalized members of the community and, in so doing, highlight new perspectives on timely social issues. Our plan was realized when we received an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) implementation grant, which coincided with the Pulse Nightclub shooting on June 12th, 2016. We invested the grant funds into a community-curated exhibit to commemorate the first anniversary of this tragic event. We invited artists and members of the local gay community, and allies, to contribute to an exhibition hosted by the University of Central Florida art gallery, a centerpiece of a series of events planned for that day. The result was Resilience: Remembering Pulse. While the exhibit was a success, the process tested the citizen curator concept by raising complicated, controversial, and politically charged questions about collecting and preserving such emotionally raw materials. Our presentation will reflect on the complex dynamic of working with conflicting ideas and perspectives, and how doing so challenged our original concept as well as our ideas about curation.
Barry Mauer is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida. He authored Deadly Delusions: Right-Wing Death Cult, co-authored Strategies for Conducting Literary Research, is co-author with David Morton of the forthcoming From Silent Cinema to Online Streaming: A Trip Down Market Street and Contemporary Developments in Apparatus Theory, and co-editor, with Anastasia Salter, of the forthcoming Reimagining the Humanities. He also publishes about citizen curating, which brings ordinary people into the production of exhibits in both online and public spaces.
John Venecek is a Humanities Librarian at the University of Central Florida. His primary areas of interest include open education resources, information literacy, and digital curation. Prior to his tenure at UCF, John taught English at the College of DuPage in Suburban Chicago and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Yekaterinburg, Russia where he founded a foreign language library/resource center. John is also an avid writer. He recently completed a manuscript about the history of the defunct Peace Corps Russia program.
10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Thursday 29th June, 2023