ICS Seminar Series - Hart Cohen, Juan Salazar and Wendy Cowan
Date: Thursday 27 August 2015
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EE.G.02, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus
Hart Cohen, Juan Salazar and Wendy Cowan
Cultural Mediations of the Visual: Knowledge Resources for Remote Indigenous Communities
Abstract
This work is developed as part of an Australian Research Council project titled, Digital Archives and Discoverability: Conceptualising the Strehlow collection as a new knowledge resource for remote indigenous communities.
This paper addresses how the re-mediation of archival images can be a basis for a form of cultural repatriation in connection to a specific community of interest. We have focussed on narrative strategies as a means of mobilising the archive with specific attention to digital storytelling in collaboration with the Ntaria School and traditional owners and elders in the remote community of Hermannsburg/Ntaria. It reflects an interest in showing how archival images can be a space where embodied knowledge and community interest in cultural history cross. Three tendencies have converged recently: the use of digital technology in the re-mediating of image collections; an interest in the repatriation of material culture by communities of interest from collecting agencies and how these image and story collections are remade by young people. Our project has embraced these three tendencies in exploring the idea of digital repatriation.The ascendency of the visual in anthropology has been marked by a tension surrounding the use of images that have been collected and sequestered in archives. Our project's interests can be summarised in four interrelated questions: How can an engagement with contemporary Aboriginal communities inform the conceptual work of the project? How can Aboriginal people discover and create their own relationships to the content of the collection? How will the digitisation of these archives enable us to find the knowledge flows relevant to the community within and across the Strehlow Research Centre Collection? How can such an intercultural and intergenerational project assist teenagers and young adults to make and sustain their own social worlds and identities in light of the school context?
Biographies
Associate Professor Hart Cohen and Associate Professor Juan Francisco Salazar (together with Dr Rachel Morley) are Chief Investigators on the Digital Archives and Discoverability project, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney*. They are also members of the Institute for Culture and Society.
Originally from Ireland, Wendy Cowan was lured by the colours of Central Australia seven years ago after over a decade in the Top End. Wendy has worked as a teacher, policy writer, project manager, curriculum and ICT advisor and as an institutional designer in a number of health, media and education projects across the Northern Territory. Wendy's work with Western Arrarnta students has won a number of awards and has been shown alongside the work of the Ngurratjuta watercolour artists at the Araluen Art Centre, Alice Springs; Parliament House, Canberra; UNSW Galleries, Sydney as well as on NITV. Students' work will be exhibited at the National Gallery Victoria later this year alongside the art of the Hermannsburg potters. Wendy is currently undertaking doctoral research, which explores the engagement of indigenous students in intercultural, intergenerational educational programs with a focus on media, art, culture and science. She is applying complexity theory approaches to notice emergence (or not) in this educational space.
*The paper is based on a work of collaboration with Wendy Cowan (Ntaria School), Mark Inkamala (Western Arrarnta traditional owner), Adam Macfie, (Repatriation Anthropologist Strehlow Research Centre), Shaun Angeles, (Research Technician, Strehlow Research Centre).
