I’m pleased to be able to share the CFP below as part of an effort to develop the infrastructures of university and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) to comment on issues of migration. This is a seed project funded by the PLuS Alliance and will feature one project in conjunction with ASU (including the Nexus Lab). We’ll also be working on a much larger grant proposal on this topic in the near future!
Call for Proposals:
GLAM+Universities Projects on Migration, Mobility, and Belonging
With the generous support of a PLuS Alliance seed grant, we are seeking proposals for projects that will test methods for creating and maintaining collaborative, multi-institutional, publicly engaged cultural ecologies on the subject of migration. Organized under the broad title mobility and belonging, we welcome proposals related to the historical, economic, political phenomena of colonization, decolonization, conflict, capital, globalization, and/or environmental displacement. We seek projects that wish to employ technology in innovative ways to bridge the gaps between Universities and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and/or Museums) institutions, and facilitate more effective ways of communicating with the public.
The PLuS Alliance is a partnership of Arizona State University, King’s College London, and University of New South Wales. One project per participating institution will be selected and supported with $2,500.00 for student research/research assistant/research associate/production and $1,500.00 in materials (all dollar amounts in local currency). Additionally, our funding will cover travel to Sydney for a collaborative symposium for project team leads. Selected project leads will also have access to the expertise of both a local PLuS Alliance Fellow and three project experts on digital scholarship, public humanities, migration studies and/or GLAM institution collaboration. We also anticipate that this seed grant will lead to one or more major grant applications and project participants will be invited and encouraged to participate.
Background
This project is designed to experiment with best practices for social, ethical, political, and technological/digital infrastructures for GLAM+University research (GLAM = Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). It prioritizes relationship building/partnerships and programming (exhibitions, knowledge sharing events, other dialogical formats etc.) that are led by or are in collaboration with those who have been affected by migration (in the expanded sense we define below) as a means to begin to shape and re-shape cultural institutions collectively.
Drawing on our shared areas of expertise at UNSW, ASU, and KCL we are focusing on a subject that is served well by the GLAM-University interface and is of critical importance to our specific locations and civil society on a global scale: migration. By migration, we mean the historic, (often) voluntary migrations that contributed to the settler colonial nations the United
States and Australia are partly founded upon. Critically, however, we also mean forced migrations that include slavery and human displacements that are a consequence of limited options–from the movement of people due to political turmoil and war, to the ones precipitated by global economic inequality and exploitation and, increasingly, environmental change. We also mean the migrations that were forced onto indigenous peoples of settler-colonies of Australia and the United States by European Empires.
GLAM institutions and universities are well placed to build better understanding of the highly complex historical and contemporary experiences of migration. For example, institutional entities like museums and universities have historic ties to the violence of both forced and voluntary migration; they are also the sites that people – both the public and researchers – turn to in order to find the traces of marginalized subjects in our respective cultures. Further, as cultural infrastructures, GLAM institutions and Universities must grapple with the complicated – often very vertical – power networks that flow through our work and institutions. These include, in the case of the United States and Australia, our shared historical realities as settler-colonial nations. On the one hand, the issues around migration and belonging are constitutive of the work we do in terms of exhibiting and interpreting our cultural heritage as scholars, curators, and public historians. On the other, the infrastructures that make this work possible have been – or can be – radically transformed by 21st century technologies and social practices. Consequently, GLAM + Universities are sites where these tensions around mobility and infrastructure enable us to forge new narratives about who we are, what we hope to become, and the tools we want to craft for the future. They are also the sites where we can and must develop new methods and relationships for 21st century scholarship and civic engagement.
Proposal Guidelines and Information
Please note that all projects must be able to mount a small public event at minimum within the 12-month time frame of this seed grant. Projects that are already underway and would benefit from resources for student research work, GLAM partnership, and public outreach are highly encouraged. Applications may come from anyone within the three universities, but are also welcomed from GLAM institutions that do not yet have or want to expand relationships with one of the participating institutions.
All applications should demonstrate a clear partnership between at least one university and a GLAM institution. While the two need not be co-located in a city or geographic region, it may be beneficial given the limitations of this seed grant phase.
Project teams agree to work with their project teams and PLuS Alliance leads to identify any areas of further development and to forge the appropriate relationships required for the project. Project teams will determine what kinds of infrastructural and/or institutional experimentation or prototyping they will be undertaking with their projects (knowledge sharing, personal relationship building, digital sharing, physical resource sharing, co-curation, or other) and will draft their own assessment materials. Project teams will be expected to send at least one team member to the in-person meeting in Sydney (date TBD, to be funded by grant) and the virtual meeting (April 2018), where the network will author draft a report with key take-aways and recommendations for future GLAM+University collaboration.
To apply, please send the following materials to Professor Jacqueline Wernimont (Jacqueline.Wernimont@asu.edu) via email by 8 p.m. GMT April 2, 2017:
- 2-3 page cover letter outlining your proposed project, including how it engages with migration as a political, cultural, economic, historical phenomena (including but not limited to mobility and belonging), partner institutions, and a description of the planned public exhibit (may be digital or analogue). Please also provide a statement regarding how this grant opportunity will help you/your team further develop the creative-collaborative ecology in your area.
- A 1-2 page summary of participants, their qualifications, and their roles.
Documentation (letters of commitment or evidence of access/ownership) that indicates the project team has the necessary assets or access thereto to mount the exhibition.