International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI): 54th Annual Conference (Web)
Time: 12.-14.09.2024
Venue: Paris-Nanterre
Proposals by: 21.06.2024
Since the 1970s, the well-known visual turn has been accompanied by a shift in the focus of museums and archives towards collecting and exhibiting objects. Especially the way of representing society in museums has changed fundamentally, so that nowadays the material history is a major trend. This development has affected museums as well archives dealing with the history of labour movements. A real effort is being made to make icons of activism and the protest movement accessible in museums. Safeguarding, collecting, conserving, describing, making them available for researchers, promoting them and writing their story raises questions. These concern us all as archivists, museum curators, librarians and researchers of various disciplines. In France, the MATOS project (Mémoires, archives et transmission des objets militants; Memories, Archives and Transmission of Activist Objects) has for several months been engaged in a collective reflection on this subject. IALHI therefore invites all kinds of contributions regarding questions along the following bullet points:
- Defining … | Collecting … | Preserving … | Processing … | Presenting … | Creating … | Researching … activist artefacts
Defining activist artefacts: What makes an object – a mug, a banner, a statuette – into an activist artefact? How can we characterise, specify and limit the scope of this category? The definition depends on how we think about the role of the „politicisation“ of objects, i.e. how we can take the use of objects into account, see as recent example of the Yellow Vests protests in France.
Collecting activist artefacts: When, how and why do archives, museums and libraries collect artefacts? How do they find their way into an archive at all? It would be of interest what has changed in the policies of collecting during the last 20 years, what role individual collectors play, how the role and meaning of heritage institutions have changed over time. Read more … (PDF)