 Hello, everyone. Hi. Thank you very much for coming here today. My name is Sevda. I'm a PhD researcher at Gritim and it's my pleasure today to introduce you Peggy Levitt. She's the Chair of Sociology Department and the Luella Lamers-Lenner Professor in Latin American Studies at Waslie College, as well as she's the coordinator, co-director of Harvard University's Politics and Social Change Workshop. She's also the co-founder of the Global Decentre. Her most recent book was called Artifacts and Allegiances, How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. It was published by the University of California Press in July 2015. Peggy also has received her honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Helsinki and from Master University. She's currently a Robert Schumann Fellow at the European University Institute and a distinguished visitor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong. Her books include Religion on the Edge, God Needs No Passport, The Transnational Studies Reader, The Changing Face of Home. So without further ado, I would like to introduce you Peggy Levitt. Thank you very much for coming. We are extremely happy to have you here. And after the lecture, we will have a Q&A session. Also, I will circulate the sheet for signatures. Please after give it back to me. Thank you. Thank you very much. Should I start over? Okay. I'll start over. I apologize for being late. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you, Ricard and your team for all the excellent planning that you did to bring me here. I have many things to talk about today, many places to go and many theoretical, then empirical, then theoretical. So I hope you can follow without whiplash and also that we can talk a lot during the question and answer if there are things that are not clear or I haven't been able to talk enough about. So let me see how this goes. Okay. So I think that you all know, you'll be familiar with the scenario of walking down a street in an immigrant neighborhood, whether we're talking about Kreuzberg in Berlin or Washington Heights in New York City or the Billmer in Amsterdam and seeing lots of things that show how people are connected to their homeland. So you might see travel agencies or money sending agencies or grocery stores that people are using to get food and products that they miss from back home. And that's because more and more people continue to vote and pray and participate in civic organizations in their homeland at the same time that they become part of the places that they are settling in and that this is not just something that poor migrants do or low skilled migrants do but it's also something that very educated professional migrants do. So for example, think about the many bedrooms and boardrooms outside of cities like Barcelona that are filled with people who come to work for long term and raise their children but still also continue to invest and cast ballots across borders. So as a matter of fact, the World Bank, according to the World Bank, one out of every seven people in the world today is an international or an internal migrant who moves by force or by choice, sometimes with great success and often with a lot of struggle. And these individuals, as you also know, send a lot of money back home. So last year remittances were equal to about 10% of the gross domestic product in 24 countries and in nine countries it was equal to 20% of the GDP. So in places like Mexico or Morocco, these contributions are one of the principal sources of foreign currency and governments want to make sure that this money keeps flowing because they now depend upon it. So and migrants are also a very important source of ideas and practices and know-how. And so what we see is lots of sending country governments mounting things like expatriate citizenship or the expatriate vote or creating special passport lines at the airport for people who are coming home. And this is to keep money coming and also to make sure that people still feel connected to their countries of origin. And so these high levels of migration are really changing the face of many cities. And I think many of you have heard the discussions about super diversity. So this idea that, but from Steve Verdovec and Suzanne Wessendorf about, you know, how new migrants from a wider range of countries with a wider range of statuses are moving into areas that were already diverse. So sort of old diversity, new diversity layered on top of old diversity. And so in cities like London you have as many as 184 nationalities and 300 languages being taught in public schools and in state-run schools. And so when you ask people who are speaking to you, it's a very complicated question. You might say I'm Jamaican and American or I'm British or Indian at the same time that you might say I'm a Londoner or a New Yorker or I'm a Muslim, I'm a professor, I'm an environmentalist thereby, you know, staking your claim not by virtue of race or ethnicity or religion but by virtue of your political contributions or your activism. So for migrants with language skills and education and social and cultural capital, these kinds of living in two worlds and having feet in more than one country come with a lot of rewards. But for many low-skilled migrants who don't have lots of education or don't have full language mastery, they're forced to move because they can't gain a secure foothold in the countries that they come from or the places that they're moving to. And either way we all know that we're living at a very particular moment of xenophobia and heightened nationalism and precarity and employment and the retrenchment of the welfare state. So I think that these dynamics really challenge basic assumptions about how we think about how family, how and where family life gets lived, how equality is produced and remediated and where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship should get fulfilled. I think we need new kinds of social safety nuts to think about new kinds of new institutional arrangements for producing social welfare that respond to this heightened mobility that many people are experiencing. But I think first to even be able to think about these new kinds of institutions we need a different kind of vocabulary that allows us to articulate a different kind of understanding of the nation that isn't necessarily stopping at its geographic borders. And we need new ways of understanding identities that aren't a zero-sum game like you're either this or you're either that. And we need new tools that are going to help us inspire the willingness to engage with people who are different whether they live across the street or whether they live across the world. And all of this is dependent upon looking more carefully I think at how knowledge gets produced, the categories and the knowledge that we use to understand and talk about these problems gets produced and gets disseminated and how we teach about it and then how we decide to act upon it. Because these are the kinds of dynamics that underlie favoring certain ways of knowing and certain kinds of knowers and marginalize others. So I think that the fluid kind of global conceptual vocabulary that's part of the social sciences to which my own work has contributed including expectations of flows and networks and transnationalism and cosmopolitanism is sometimes out of sync with current realities and much more possible for some racial and economic groups than for others. Much of mainstream scholarship on migration and race and ethnicity is off key because it still relies unreflexively on these old categories without looking at what are their intellectual genealogies? Where did they come from? When were they produced and who was producing them to do what kind of work? And also they're also based on assumptions about what's the appropriate scale and space and values that underlie these assumptions such as integration and assimilation. So in much of the research that's been done about those processes, there's still an underlying assumption that migrants need to or will be able to become integrated into a white majority mainstream even if scholars recognize that this is a two way process that the newcomers and the old timers are mutually influencing each other. But in many large cities migrants and their children are living alongside other migrants in areas where there are very few native born residents and really the so-called migrants who are entering the city are the white residents who are returning to urban areas where many migrants have been living for generations. So I think scholars of race and ethnicity are not the only ones guilty of using categories unreflexively and not really thinking about where they come from and what kinds of assumptions they're based on. When you think about much of the social science and the humanities that's produced in Europe and the United States, it's still very western centric. It's based on theories that are developed and reflecting the experience of the global north. And it's an insular conversation primarily between people who can read and write in English and the geographic focus is normally limited to Europe and the United States. So one prominent example of this is a lot of the work that's been done on the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015 and 2016. A lot of European researchers look primarily at the effect on Europe while it was actually countries like Jordan and Turkey and Lebanon that were most affected. And when people were talking about what to do educationally for refugee children instead of going back to Lebanon or Turkey or the schools where Syrian children were being educated, they mostly looked at what was happening in Europe rather than the effect on the Middle East, which was a really important contributor to student performance that got overlooked in the discussions. So what I want to argue for today is a kind of fundamental reconsideration of and reorganization of knowledge production. And because I think that intellectual and cultural inequality are part and parcel of socioeconomic inequality. And we're not going to do better at one if we don't do better at the other. So we can't really create a better world if we don't understand the premises behind the knowledge that we use to understand that world and how they've been produced. And so what I want to suggest is that we need to look more carefully at what kinds of experiences get silenced and what kind of experiences get a bright light shined on them and what's been hiding in plain sight all along. And it's not only a question about what comes clearly into view when we're excavating these embedded assumptions, it's also about how to create new worlds and new methods and new institutions that don't repeat the same mistake. So you're all the next generation and I hope that your training is training you to do this so that you can chart a more constructive way forward and not be stuck in the same kind of misconceptions. So there's a large body of critical theory and post-colonial theory that tries to do a lot of the intellectual work that I'm proposing. So Talal Asad for one wrote very compellingly about the need to provincialize Europe, not in the sense of shifting our attention from Europe to elsewhere, but in calling attention to the ways that European and American theoretical formations are promoted as general and universalizable theories and not realizing that not all theories apply to all places or that not all places do something called theory necessarily. So as Chakrabarty noted the focus of provincializing Europe is to suture the particular historical conditions of its theoretical projects back onto or into those theories so that scholars and others will be able to evaluate them along the same lines as other theories not generally thought of as universalizable. So the true decentralization of scientific and analytical knowledge requires recognizing and legitimizing other knowledges and other histories produced beyond the Eurocentric access. So I think this call has been taken up to varying degrees by different disciplines. So disciplines like comparative literature or feminist and religious studies and anthropology to a certain extent are very much engaged with these kinds of conversations. I don't think that sociology and political science are up to speed with it. So what we need to do is to deep provincialize across disciplines and in that way shrink the epistemological distance between the north and south or what have been the centers and peripheries of knowledge production. So today what I want to do is flesh out a bit more about what I mean by this charge and then give two empirical examples from my museum work but also from the current work that I'm doing on the global artistic and literary worlds and try to show you how this in these institutional spheres we are being asked to and succeed at thinking about different ways of understanding the nation and what belonging and migration and citizenship actually mean. So first I want to give credit to some of the colleagues that I've been working on these issues with including Maurice Krule and Kelly Rutherford, Veep Kasigar Severs, Erica Dobbs, Roxandra Paul and Ken Sun and all of the members of the Global Decentre which I'm going to say something about at the end of my talk. So first I think we need to ask we need to consider about the questions that we ask. So more and more the questions that we ask are determined by the priorities of funding agencies that provide us with resources to answer them. So the EU I think is a very good example of this. Its research agenda often seems to be driven by the need to solve policy questions. Funders design research programs around pressing problems and support mega projects intended to answer them that involve multiple partners throughout the EU. So in the case of migration scholarship many of the projects are about helping national policy makers address problems arising in schools or neighborhoods in cities that have become more ethnically or religiously or racially diverse. So it's about understanding integration processes, social inclusion and creating a next generation of researchers and bureaucrats that are able to drive these processes successfully forward. There are several problems with this kind of efforts. I'm not saying that we don't need this kind of scholarship but I don't think that's the only kind of scholarship that we need. The first is that people are under tremendous pressure to win these enormous grants to be able to get promoted in the academic world and evaluators of these grants generally favor people who publish in English and in peer reviewed journals. And because the grants are organized around work packages that directly inform policy there's really little room to ask questions that are just of intellectual interest or that don't fit into the kind of policy box that policy makers are interested in. So somebody who's truly innovative, the Albert Einstein's of today, probably wouldn't get funded because their questions don't fit into one of the categories that you need to get funding. The second problem is that while I applaud comparative research and I understand the impetus to create these teams across countries so you create kind of a European class of researchers I also think it's very hard to have this research add up to more than the sum of its individual parts because you have so many different pieces and so little time to actually do the comparative analysis that a lot of times that piece of the analysis once you finally collected the data and you sit down to analyze what's going on in your own country the time that's left to sit down and analyze across cases is often just too short to come up with something that's really meaningful. And the third issue is that this isn't just a problem of Europe or the United States more and more the forces that are globalizing the academy and universities around the world are homogenizing education everywhere. And so scholars outside the west are also under tremendous pressure to publish in rated in journals with impact factors and journals that are in English which is another death knoll to their own creativity and producing knowledges in ways that don't conform to this kind of output. The second thing I want to I think we need to pay attention to is the scales and the spaces and the geographies that we examine. So there are lots of calls to do away or address methodological nationalism or this idea that social life automatically and forever will take place within the framework of the nation state. But when we open the lens by using a transnational optic we see that it's not possible to understand dynamics that get labeled local or national without seeing how they're connected with forces that are going on far away. So recognizing this Edward Mead argued for the need for a contrapuntal reading of literature and by that he meant how we listen to music that when we listen to music we listen to all the parts simultaneously. So you can't read a book like Jane Eyre without seeing how that big mansion in Europe where the characters are living was built on the backs of the plantation the workers on the plantation that the owners own in the colonies. So the narrative is seemingly about the metropole but the far reaches of the empire are always there in the shadows. And then what does interdisciplinary work actually look like? So most of us take for granted the analytical purchase that would come from doing interdisciplinary work. But that's also easier said than done. What often happens in my experience is that it feels a little bit like you're at the United Nations but without somebody doing the translating. So it's very hard to actually talk across disciplines because many disciplines are so filled with jargon. And people are not willing to do the hard work of really getting out of sight of their comfort zones and learning the assumptions of other disciplinary perspectives. So you have to think carefully about who you invite to the table because it's a rare scholar who's willing to do that work and also get sort of out of their normal way of doing things. As it stands now many of the same conversations or their equivalents as a result are taking place in these silos. So as I've been working more on issues of literary circulation and artistic circulation I've had to learn a lot about the same discussion in the cultural sociology comparative literature art history and a lot of the discussions are the same but we don't end up talking to each other. So we're rehearsing the same arguments and answers within and between the humanities and the social sciences and not moving forward by joining forces. So what would it really mean to provincialize scholarship? Well I think that's the most important question of all and a lot of that has to do with where you start the conversation. So if you tell the story of the Americas starting in 1492 then you miss the many civilizations that were in existence before Columbus discovered America. Or if you place the cradle of civilization in Greece and Rome then you miss the many contributions that places like Baghdad and Kumasi made many years before. If you leave Jews out of the history of Poland then you leave out how you can't really understand Poland without the history of Jews there and you can't really understand Jewish history without taking into account the Jewish experience in Poland. So where and when the story begins really matters and for what kinds of knowledge gets valued and disseminated and this seems like common sense but when you look at syllabi for many courses in these disciplines in the United States and Europe there's still very very Eurocentric and I can talk about empirical work that I'm doing to make that point. The second way to provincialize scholarship is to recognize that what qualifies as theory and the work that so-called theory is supposed to be doing looks different in different parts of the world. So what it means to know and explain doesn't necessarily mirror western epistemological and ontological assumptions or inter and intellectual frames can be created according to different standards and expected to do different kinds of work and they need to be judged according to the claims that they make and the kinds of parameters that they set for themselves. So we can't use one set of standards to analyze knowledge that's being created under different circumstances and expected to do other kind of work. So let's take the example of immigration. In some parts of the world there's not even a word for that. So I remember work long ago done by Karen Fogg, a Danish anthropologist who said that in the context of the Caribbean people didn't talk about immigration because movement for social and economic life was just a normal part of everyday life and so there was no word, there shouldn't be migration studies because mobility, yes, but migration, permanent migration and resettlement was not part of the experience. So that's just one trivial example of how things that experiences that we assume to be universal and terminology that we use as universal doesn't apply everywhere. So where do I see this kind of work being done and how can we help it along? So I'm going to switch gears now and talk about museums. I'm going to talk about museums and I'm going to talk about the global publishing world. There's a lot of discussion about museum, the museum world and about becoming more global but also, and I'm not sure how much this is going on in Spain, but about repatriating artifacts that were gotten under questionable circumstances during colonial periods. But museums are really also sites of knowledge production, important sites of knowledge production and shaping understandings of the nation and who belongs and of the nation's place in the world. So we need to understand how to read not only the content of the museum but how the spatial organization of the museum both in the galleries themselves but also the galleries in relation to each other are sending us messages about what's valued and what we should pay attention to and what we should sort of put to the side. So my questions in my last book, I had been studying migration for a very long time from a transnational perspective and I kept thinking I see all these people from all different countries living aspects of their lives transnationally. How come we still have this idea of the nation state as this closed rooted static container and where are different understandings of the nation going to come from. And I got to the idea of museums because museums in the past have always been important creators of nations and national citizens and so I wanted to know what role they were playing today in terms of helping us reconsensualize a more increasingly diverse nation internally but also how that nation positioned itself, understood its position in the world. So to answer these questions I traveled around the world and looked at all different kinds of museums because I think that even museums that are art museums or history museums tell us a lot about the nation. So I looked at ethnographic museums, art museums, what I call constituency museums so in some countries there are museums that are dedicated to the experience of particular groups and cultural history museums. I wrote about this in my book Artifacts and Allegiances which you mentioned when you introduced me. So I want to share a little bit with you about that today but what I did was not an evaluation study or not a reception study so I'm only able to tell you about what the curators and museum professionals that I talked with thought that they were doing not how well they were doing it or how much visitors got their answers. So what I did was compare three sets of countries so seven cities. Two countries that were over their empire so Denmark and Sweden so I worked in Copenhagen and Gothenburg and Stockholm then museums in the United States so a country in Boston and New York so a country that some are hanging on as tight as possible to the idea that we're still in the imperial moment of the United States and some understand that we're starting to see we're already in the decline of that empire and then Singapore and Doha so two countries that are using culture to stake a more to build a nation but also to stake a more important regional if not global position. And I wanted to know where these museums fell on this kind of cosmopolitan nationalism continuum or that how did they articulate how did they help the nation articulate what was nationalism and then how was that positioned with respect to the world and before I go on I want to say a little bit about what I mean about cosmopolitanism so I treated this as an empirical question so I didn't go in with some recipe book about this is what cosmopolitanism is and I'm hoping to find it instead I asked the people that I was interviewing if and how they felt that their work was contributing to cosmopolitanism and what that would mean to them and it turned out that cosmopolitanism has three parts had three parts one was ideas and practices the second was skills and one was ideas and values the second was skills and practices and the third was cosmetics or what a what would be a political project that would make a cosmopolitan world come into being and these these parts didn't necessarily come into come together so what were cosmopolitan ideas and skills things like tolerance critical thinking listening curiosity empathy diversity flexibility and interest in understanding and engaging with other people's experiences sometimes things came up like human rights and gender equality and democracy but these were clearly problematic in places like Singapore and Doha and cosmopolitan projects came up much less because they were also much more difficult to agree upon so at the end of the day at least from the perspective of my project the cosmopolitanism boiled down to being able and willing to participate in a conversation about what the common ground might be and it was recognizing the need for such a dialogue between diverse conversation partners who had the discipline and skills to move that forward so as I said museums are a natural place to explore these questions because they've always played this starring role in creating nations and when you think about it some of the world's greatest museums came of age or were born at the same time as the nation states where they are where they're created I wonder when when was the Prado created in relation to Spanish in modern Spain's anyway we could talk about that later because I haven't thought about the Spanish idea but when you think about the Louvre and its birth right around the French Revolution that's what I'm talking about because the thinking was to grow strong as a new nation people had to be able to recognize values and rituals and customs that everyone shared and so what got included in the museum was a way to show what these values were and what these traditions were but usually the nation was defined as only extending to the national border so people who were different whether racially or ethnically or religiously weren't likely to see their experience showcased in the galleries of the museum there's also countries also displayed their might, their imperial might by showing things that they collected so they would bring things back to show how strong they were as a nation but as the disciplines of sociology and anthropology took hold instead of organizing these materials by type by what they were used for people will organize them according to an evolutionary typology and so the nation state where the materials were showcased was clearly at the top of the typology and the state from where they came from was lower down so that meant that you were justified in conquering that country or in Christianizing them in going on a missionizing mission so whether they were opening up the former royal collections to create a more unified national public or putting work from regions of the world not before seen on display museums have never been egalitarian projects and they exposed visitors to a certain kind of knowledge based on a certain set of values the ordering and reordering of objects and their positions in relation to each other legitimates certain political and social hierarchies and privilege some ways of knowing and exclude others so we have this when we go into a museum we have this idea that knowledge and identity and culture can be represented as something simple and factual and real and you come in sort of trained when you've gone to museums enough of your life you kind of come in and you're ready to accept this knowledge and take it as given instead of realizing that there's a person a curator behind knowledge it's not God who's writing that text on the wall it's somebody with opinions and positions and we need to be able to decode that so and this is what Corinne Kratz calls rhetorics of values so when you walk into a museum gallery your gaze is being directed by the lighting by the position of the objects in relation to each other so something that's in the center that has a bright light shined on to it attracts your attention something that's in the back or something that's below your eye level you play less attention to and these are ways that value is being contributed also there are that's not only happening in the gallery it's happening in the what museum professionals call the real estate of the museum so how are the galleries distributed in relation to each other so when you think about how maybe your favorite museum the ones that I know best especially as a child had these big staircases that you walked up into so you felt like you were ascending into this temple of knowledge and then you go into this grand entrance hall which makes you feel very small because and communicates sort of western superiority through its bricks and mortar and usually there's the Greek and the Roman and then you ascend another staircase and there's the European which is the pièce de resistance and you have to look really hard to find the African or the Latin American so this is another kind of rhetoric of value that's being communicated by the decisions of the way space is organized so as a result there are a lot of people who think that museums are beyond repair so Hassan Haag who's an anthropologist who lives in Australia now just says they're too flawed to ever write their their western centric biases and they're too self referential and so just let's forget about it let's close their doors basically and only upper class people feel welcome in museums and so they just reproduce social inequality a second view says museums are not political so you know that these are art museums that are about preserving and conserving and protecting history so James Cuno who is the head of the Getty Foundation which is a very influential player in this world says do you walk through the galleries of your local museum and feel controlled in any significant way do you feel manipulated by a higher power he believes that museums still matter and that enlightenment principles still apply so for Cuno museums don't create citizens be they national or global they collect, classify and present facts and they do that for the betterment of humankind but then there's a third view which was mostly what I heard from the museum professionals that I talked with that say that museums can and have to reinvent themselves to become viable and socially to remain viable and socially relevant and that they know that they're still primarily for people with degrees on their walls money in their pockets but if they want to stay viable they have to change and that they're actually being forced to change even if they don't want to because of the demography in many countries that are just making the population much more diverse and the population that's inside the museum that comes inside the museum isn't keeping up with the population outside the museum and that spells dooms day for museums if they don't start doing something differently so the museum that I visited told a completely cosmopolitan or national story the national was always viewed through a global lens and the global was always viewed through a national perspective so I came to kind of think of this as a cosmopolitan nationalism continuum and my question became what explains what combination of cosmopolitan and nationalism I'm seeing in the particular museums that I was studying and so there's a lot of kind of unexpected there's a lot of sort of logical answers to this question that you won't find very surprising one has to do with what's in the collections of the museum so a museum can only put on display what it has in its collections or what it can borrow from other museums it has to do with the expertise of the curators the interest and the expertise of the curators that they only want to work in areas or do exhibits of what they feel comfortable with it has to do with whether they're publicly or privately funded so in the United States we have mostly private museums in Sweden there are mostly public museums that are seen as tools of the government to achieve its social goals and it has to do with the scope of the museum so did it start out life as an art museum and then what's the kind of path dependency that comes from that or did it start out life as an ethnographic museum and then what are the implications of that and then there's often a kind of ecology in the city an organizational ecology that comes with an implicit distribution of labor and by that I mean that one museum is the national museum and it does the nation and another museum is the city museum or the constituency museum and that's where diversity is supposed to be talked about and so they're doing it in separate silos again and since one takes care of it the other one doesn't have to do it but I think these differences also arise from three other factors that I want to highlight and one is the idea of a city's cultural armature so I think about this as its cultural policies its history its demography its institutions that were put in place when the founding fathers and they usually were founding fathers of the city established these institutions and so their ideas about individualism versus the collective about how much inequality you're going to tolerate in your community were laid down in the bricks and mortar of these institutions and continue to echo and ripple today and part of that cultural armature is the diversity management regime and that is if diversity gets talked about and what kinds of words get used to talk about it and how it gets measured and if it's considered an opportunity or a problem and so for example in the United States we often talk about being a Chinese American a hyphenated American a Chinese American an Indian American and until the recent until our recent political moment few people were questioning whether the Chinese part of the equation or the Indian part of the equation or the Italian part of the equation took away from the Americanist in fact a lot of people would have argued that to be American was to be a hyphenated American so it's not a surprise that in the United States you have lots of museums dedicated to the experience of particular groups like the Museum of African Americans the Museum of Native Americans that have just been developed in Scandinavia it's very unusual for someone to say I'm a Pakistani Dane or an Iraqi Swede and so there are no such kinds of museums dedicated to there are very few such museums dedicated to the experience of particular groups the second factor that I want to highlight is where a country is in the global cultural hierarchy so just as we think about countries being in an economic and a political hierarchy we can also think about a cultural hierarchy and where you are in that where what your position is in that ranking influences how much you affect and how much you're affected by something that I call a global museum assemblage so what I saw when I traveled around the world to these different places is a way a package of ways of doing museum that was replicated around the world so where do we see that well you see that in the curatorial studies programs and the museum education programs that are proliferating around the world you see it in the fact that most museums have the same kind of gourmet restaurants and bookstores and gift shops and blockbuster exhibits that we've kind of come to expect from a museum visit you see that in the buildings that are designed for new museums so there's a group of stark attacks or six or seven architects that are responsible for many of the new museum buildings that you're seeing going up starting with Bill Bow with Getty and Bill and people like Jean Nouvel who are seen across the world and then there's the professionals the class of professionals that is migrating that are also part of this assemblage but also the ones who are carrying it in their laptops and in their briefcases and in their portfolios because when they go from place to place whether it's regionally or moving from Brooklyn to Singapore and then to Doha they're carrying this package of how to do museums with them and disseminating it and carrying it forward so what happens is that when you are very prominently positioned in the global cultural hierarchy you're very much affected by this global museum assemblage and when you're sort of farther away from it it matters less to you and you contribute to it less and then finally museum practice is very based on where a country is in the arc of its nation building project so for countries like Singapore and Doha that are really trying to reposition themselves they are they tend to be more nationalistic but with an eye towards the globe in terms of where they fall on the cosmopolitan nationalism continuum so now I'm going to take you to a few museums very quickly this is where the whiplash of the presentation comes in so that you can see more concretely what I'm talking about so when Sweden, when you think about the history of Sweden it was a very homogeneous country it thought of itself as very independent so Olif Palma talked about a world without solidarity Prime Minister, Sweden was charting a third way between communism and capitalism, was very very proud of its nation its national social welfare system and then the world economy starts shifting, Sweden experiences some economic downturns, it needs immigrants to drive its industry forward and so before Sweden thought of itself as a place the world needs us as an example and then it started to feel like we need the world and we're going to use museums to figure out what that looks like and also to deal with our changing face and so Sweden falls on the far end towards the global of the cosmopolitan of nationalism, cosmopolitan continuum and we see this in the kinds of exhibits that museums are promoting these are pictures from the museum of world cultures which tells you something in and of itself, the title of the museum, that's in Gothenburg and this was from an exhibit that was Bollywood posters for films and in other it came from Finland so in other settings where this exposition had traveled the posters were paired with discussion of Hinduism and discussion of India in general but here the theme of the exhibition was there are many cultural centers and many cultural peripheries so there's Hollywood but there's also Bollywood and there's also Nollywood and then this is from an exhibition about migration and this was called Destination X where people were asked to contribute objects that were meaningful for them because the curators wanted people to understand the difference between having one color passport or another color passport so this is a quote from the curator who organized this exhibit we wanted to explore said Klaus Grinnell who has the freedom to move and who doesn't today if you don't have the right color passport money or skin you can't move freely societies are not stable because mobility is a fact of modern life the exhibition state might just be a parenthesis just one way of understanding and organizing human life the exhibition didn't propose an answer or a solution but instead tried to get visitors to think about how we imagine who belongs somewhere and who should stay and how travel is rather contingent but despite this kind of very cosmopolitan approach it's very hard to find the immigration experience in Sweden so you have to really find the diversity within the country so the immigrant experience is there but it's rather subtle when I asked the people at the Nordiska Museum which is sort of the national encyclopedic museum in Stockholm one of the curators responded well maybe we don't see them explicitly no we're really but of course they are there when you look at the silver you realize it reflects the German experience which was big in Sweden in the 19th century for example so this is in part because of that institutional distribution of labor that I was talking about that you know the diversity should be shown in the city museum so the Stockholm city museum or in a special multicultural center that's located in a very immigrant an immigrant neighborhood with lots of immigrants living in it in Stockholm and so according to the Stockholm museum head of documentation this focus has often been when it comes to programming about immigrants on children's programming or contemporary collection we have not worked very hard on it although we're trying now with contemporary collections I want to see I want to find themes where the immigrant experience can be part of another theme not special projects about what it is to be an immigrant I think it's really important to say that immigration is part of contemporary Swedish history it's not something at the margins it's really something in the middle in Sweden ideas of immigrants have been talked about as a problem as something that's not a part of society and I think after all these years we have to let that go so now let's go to Boston where the museum of fine arts which is a museum an encyclopedic museum so an art museum but also decorative objects and material culture built a new wing called the art of the Americas in 2010 and that was a wing that added about a third to the museum's space and the idea here was that it would tell a story on each of the four floors about a retelling of American art that it was always internationally influenced so this is the collection that begins on the bottom floor this is a an ancient American collection these are kitschy burial urns from Guatemala and the idea here is that these objects were at the foundation of American art that all American art throughout the continent started with these indigenous communities whether they be in North America or South America and then each of the things that you see when you enter the galleries on each of the successive floors is supposed to drive home that message this is a silver bowl that was made by Paul Revere it's an iconic American one of the three most iconic American objects allegedly except when I give this talk when I used to give this talk frequently and I would say well what is this nobody could tell what it was but the idea here is that everything that was being made in Boston at the time that Paul Revere who made this was working was very influenced by the East Asian trading and so this is very influenced by Chinese aesthetics but so a very national object is really very internationally influenced and then here's a portrait of Paul Revere with this teacup which is also very Chinese influenced and then the museum did another interesting thing which was to admit that there wasn't just a colonial experience in New England there was also a colonial Spanish experience going on in Spanish and connected to Spain and so here they have a Spanish colonial gallery and what you're supposed to see is the connection between the other materials the decorative materials and the paintings in the adjacent galleries so here is a painting of a legislator from Philadelphia he's a law maker and he's asserting you can feel his authority by the way he sits and the way he's dressed and the seat that he's in and then this is the Archbishop of Mexico that was painted around the same time and he also expresses authority and power and so you're supposed to see how whether it was through crucifixes and communion wafers or through law books that both of these but there was similar ways of expressing power throughout the colonies but what happens here is that we have a different kind of story about American art that tells us a lot about what we should think about inward but not a lot about what we should think about outward so in other words it doesn't the exhibition doesn't really help us rethink what this means about America's position in the world and the last exhibition that I want to show you is Doha so this is a picture of Doha in the early 1980s where this was the first Sheraton hotel that was being built and this is a picture of the Doha skyline today I'm using Doha and Qatar interchangeably because Doha is the capital of Qatar and really most of the majority of the population live in Qatar and Doha and so Doha is an example like Singapore which is a place that's using museums along with a whole host of other interventions like hosting the World Cup like having Qatar Airways, like having Education City which is a place where many universities have campuses to try to show to try to signal two things an inside message and an outside message the inside message is you belong to a country with a rich history that is unique from its neighbors and the outside message is this is a country that you need to pay attention to and we're going to engage on the world stage but do it in our own way so we're going to take what we agree with from the west but reject what we don't agree with from the west and protect our traditions particularly those pertaining to Islam so when you're talking about making global citizens or national citizens in this context you really have to think about what that means though because 12% of the population in Doha are actually Qataris and they are very privileged in the sense that they all get free education, free access to land about $78,000 per year but the rest of the population that's living there are the people that are constructing these museums or constructing these skyscrapers and they are either highly paid or very privileged professionals or the vast majority are low skilled workers from South Asia in particular who have almost no rights and are working under deplorable conditions so it puts a new slant on the kinds of questions that I was trying to ask but here is another example of a kind of contemporary version of that museum that I was talking about with the big stairway and the big entrance hall so this is the Islamic art that was designed by I.M. Pei who's another of these stark attacks and this is the grand entrance hall that you see and notice how there's lots of space between the objects, it's almost like you're in a jewelry store and your attention is being directed to these precious objects that are communicating how valuable and how people should be proud of this but at the same time Qatar needs a cutting edge of the contemporary art museum and so this is Mataf where they're doing edgy discussions about delus and Qatari and showing contemporary artwork such as this exhibit that was about Egyptology and this is a sarcophagus that's made out of Tupperware so all of these things are trying to signal to say something about the nation both to the people who do not live there but also to outsiders so Qatari is trying its best said Roger Mandel who was the former head of the museum authority that was building all these museums at the time I was doing my research there were 16 museums that were on the docket to build upon its Bedouin traditions and on Islam but to think about cosmopolitanism in a new way how does a centuries old very narrow localized culture the corner of the tent narrow which suddenly has more resources than it knows what to do with use that legacy to engage with the rest of the world and at the same time say what their culture means in the 21st century unlike its neighbors Qatar wants to join the international conversation on its own terms as an equal they're not giving themselves over not retreating but instead trying to participate as full partners in the dialogue on their own terms they're not importing culture from outside he believes but helping citizens develop a sense of the cultural riches and history right here inside their home region so now I just want to quickly before concluding tell you a little about my current work and this is also I'm exploring these questions of cultural and intellectual inequality by looking at the workings of the global art world and the global literary world now when you think about the number of books that actually get translated from different languages it's very overwhelmingly dominated by books that get translated into English so for example in the United States and the UK translations make up books that are written into English that are written in English so there's much more translating into English than translating out of English in the United States and the UK translations make up only 3% of the books that are published and that's 1% of that 3% is literature which is what I'm interested in and those that get translated are mostly established authors most of them write in French followed by German and the only Asian language on the top of the list excuse me is Japanese that means that our literary tastes are very parochial and that the taste of the English speaking public disproportionately influence what ends up on what ends up on our reading list and when you look at the numbers of national prizes who's won the Nobel Prize for example over the years between 1901 and 2017 29 Nobel laureates wrote in English 14 in French 13 in German 11 in Spanish two in Chinese one in Bengali one in Russia and one in Arabic now that doesn't mean that writers in Bengali or Arabic or Chinese are less talented than their English or French speaking counterparts it just means that the politics and the economics of the publishing industry is very much stacked towards English and French so what makes it possible then for authors from what Pascal Casanova has called literally impoverished countries to scale shift and by that I mean to gain to scale out horizontally to places of equal prestige and power or to scale up to places of more power and there are a lot of answers that the literature gives to this one is that authors would conform to the styles that are dominant in this world republic of letters which is what Casanova called this literary world or you write from the diaspora from exile and you get famous outside your country and then you get famous within the country or the asymmetrical relations that are involved in translations but I think what's missing from this analysis is the kind of spatial conditions and the spatial organization of circulation how spatial factors affect the circulation and pathways of circulation so what I want to argue is that we need to empirically determine what's the actual space of literary circulation and investigate the role of regions rather than expecting that everything goes from national to the global and then also pay attention to the topographical and infrastructural properties of that influence scale shifting so this is a project that I'm doing that looks at how artists and writers from Lebanon, South Korea and Argentina gain recognition in the global field and today I'm just going to talk about Lebanon and I'm just going to talk briefly about what happens in the literary world so what I mean when I say that we need to pay attention to the topographical properties of fields it makes sense to me to think of these arenas of circulation these fields the way that Bordeaux talked about them but that we could talk about how settled or how unsettled a field is and by that I mean whether its institutions are long standing whether they're functioning in a kind of routine way or whether there's lots of conditions that constantly circulate and constantly influence its strength and its direction and then what I mean by infrastructure is really drawing on work that's being done in the humanities that looks at the platforms and passageways and containers that shape our knowledge and power and ideas circulate and so this is like the nuts and the bolts of the global publishing industry now just to say a little bit about Lebanon it's a very fractured and unsettled place so the civil war went on for 15 years and the lasting effects of that war in terms of sectarian difference are still very very much prominent so no one's expecting Lebanon to become a multi-cultural country where everyone can produce something called the national culture in fact it's much more that there's the French speaking culture, there's the Arabic speaking culture and then more and more there's a class of people who function in English and overlaid onto that are religious differences and then you have many Syrian refugees who have come to Lebanon in the past few years and then a long standing Palestinian population so here's how I want to think about what the transnational literary world looks like and so when you come from a country where there's multiple languages you can have the original language that a book is written in and then it could scale out to get translated into other languages that are used in that country or you can scale up to approximate region or a far region so for example when Lebanese writers scale up to when they end up in France when they end up being published in France that is closer to Lebanon some place in French speaking Africa but we still have to consider that as part of the French transnational linguistic region and so here's how I would think about the actual siloing of this regional circulation from Lebanon so we have an Arab, Arabophone trans region which includes far away Arab speakers in Africa and Asia and Europe but the proximate speakers who are and readers who are in the Gulf and the Maghreb and in the nearby countries you have the French trans region which is far away which is Caribbean and Asia and France and then the French region which is close by and then the Anglophone region which is actually two regions books that circulate in the Commonwealth countries and then books that circulate in North America and the former Commonwealth and then in North America so let me just talk briefly about the what's going on in the Arab region and when we did an analysis of how many people actually get translated we came up with a group of 31 authors 16 male and 15 female but very few of them actually get translated into non-European languages so there is a rate of translation into other European languages but there are only about three or four that get translated into non-European languages and that's why in this oops sorry in this slide the global piece is very small because I wanted to find global as not just getting translated into European language but getting translated into other languages that are non-European and non-English as well so what is it about the Arabic language that explains this circulation and this lack of translation well this is a market that consists of several sub markets that are sufficiently distinct economically and also politically unsettled enough that circulation is really very very difficult so there is this Yasmina Yazrati who is a literary agent talked about the Arabic publishing world as having no systematic distribution channels no systematic diffusion no publicity available no publicly available sales figures no real evaluation relatively little coverage in the media and only a small number of bookstores in other words the highly developed infrastructure that you have in the French and English speaking world that supports writing and reading and publishing is still very much a work in progress in the Arab speaking world and if you agree what's the best path to move forward whether to replicate a western model or to chart a different way forward so as it stands there are far fewer books published and sold based on industry expectations given the sheer size of the market and production and distribution networks are very decentralized and informal and fragile rather than concentrated in the hands of a few powerful publishers like they are in the Spanish publishing world or in the French publishing world and since there's no clear gatekeepers here it's very difficult for outsiders to come in and figure out what the rules of the game are so there's sort of no central management place where you go in and say I want to come in and do business in this region tell me how to do it the rules of the game are very unclear and it feels like a very contentious place and the region is very divided by war, by economic downturn so that markets that used to thrive and work on a pretty regular way are very much disrupted and people don't have enough money to buy books now because as one important publisher said a drop in oil prices affects the market and books are not considered a must so there's and it's very hard for and expensive for distribution to happen across the region so you have this kind of power vacuum and into that enters the Gulf countries which are very much concerned about reading and writing in Arabic going down and so just as you have these amazing museums being created in Qatar the sheikah of Abu Dhabi is very much behind creating a new Arabic public publishing world especially books that are interesting for children so that reading and writing doesn't fall down so and of course language is a site of struggle so throughout the region and there's a whole discussion about what kinds of things you can write about in Arabic because some people feel like it's a sacred language of the Quran and should not be toyed with and so even what the rules of the game are in this field in terms of what's the appropriate use of language and what topics can be talked about are really up for grabs so it's a very unsettled topography and the infrastructure is very loose and informal and uninstitutionalized and so that makes circulation very very difficult so just to conclude I hope I've convinced you of the importance of bringing questions of cultural and intellectual inequality into our scholarship and that looking at places like museums and the publishing world and their efforts to become more inclusive or not and why they succeed or not are important and interesting sites that we often don't think of as migration scholars to explore these questions. I want to close with a few brief ideas about what I think are constructive ways forward. My own personal response to this is to create a network which with Maurice Krull that we call the Global Decentre and that is a platform of academics and practitioners of different kinds who are really concerned and committed to producing and disseminating and teaching about and acting upon knowledge in more inclusive ways and we want to train ourselves and our students in ways of asking and answering questions from all parts of the world and to develop critical pedagogies to make available curricular materials from all over and then to partner with a range of innovative creative partners to do unexpected interventions that kind of surprise you and get you to look at the world in a different way even if it's just a very punctual small kind of experience so we don't want to create a bricks and mortar center and in fact we're trying to model what we call guerrilla research in saying that there's not big grants are really great but you don't need big grants to be able to do good things and you can creatively form partnerships and opportunistically in the best sense of that word do things with partners that drive this kind of agenda forward and we know that we're not by any means the first to do this kind of work there are all kinds of examples of people who are doing it but from our perspective there's a lot of things that go under the label of international that are really just Europeans and people from the United States or North America and there are not interdisciplinarities restricted to certain disciplines but the most important thing that I think we're trying to do differently is to deconstruct and reconstruct or to kind of critique but also chart a positive way forward there's a lot of critique that goes on and then it stops there rather than saying okay this is what we can do better so what we think of ourselves as saying rather than saying no but we try to say yes and I hope that some of you will want to join us on that and actually I think I'm going to stop there so thank you very much I hope you have lots of questions I know I talked a lot but you told me to talk for an hour and 15 minutes which is very hard to listen to I think not much talking thank you for your talk so my name is Yasmin Khan and I arrived here yesterday you arrived here yesterday you said? yeah I'm a visiting researcher so my work is in Bangladesh with Rohingya refugees and people living outside and I have a couple questions we talk a lot about publishing as producers and consumers of academic articles when is the tide going to shift to be more inclusive for not just the languages but the formats that are accepted through academia I think of Leanne Simpson and Sarah Hunt indigenous women who are writing with storytelling and poetry including new forms of writing as academic very successful academic literature so I'm thinking a lot about how do we recognize the power that we have not just this very anxiety producing way of having to write the perfect academic article but we are the makers and the consumers both how do we push the envelope to really change the formats that are accepted and then also as I work with Rohingya how do we start to include all of these rich languages that are not written so Rohingya language doesn't have a written format but there's so many brilliant people that I met who live in that refugee camp who have ideas that they want to share but it's not accepted as a non-written language to be able to write in the language that they know best even though most people in that camp speak four or five languages but in the native language there's no way really to push even when I presented bringing recordings as part of my dissertation it was completely not allowed by the university but those two things non-written languages and then new formats not just new languages I think it's a great question and it's certainly central to the things that I care a lot about and I don't I think that that's a change that's going to happen really gradually I think you're seeing avenues more avenues than before because there are all kinds of platforms to communicate and exist outside the formal academic institutional writing but we're still in a very institutional context in which traditional things are conditional kinds of outputs are consecrated and need to look a certain way and I just think we have to keep fighting that fight by producing really interesting moving that break the boundaries I mean it's sort of like what's your theory of social change do you just ramrod it through or do you take little baby steps that let the audience get used to it and then you just introduce modern change, modern change, modern change until all of a sudden a product like that is the norm that we could spend the whole day discussing that but I think we just have to keep doing it and I hear discussions at universities about what constitutes appropriate academic outputs for things like promotion and tenure and I don't think that's a conversation that's anywhere over or that it's really become much more inclusive but I do hear conversations about that so I think that's a good sign. Well thanks for the presentation first. My question is related to the regional differences within a country so we know that regions don't always agree with how the nation state is perceived by the federal government so I'd like to know if in your research you have found differences within the country for instance California perceives migration different than Texas for example and in the national museums in these two states could there be for instance differences on how they shape and produce and knowledge related to history for example? Yeah that's a great question and I think I could have written a book just about the representation of the United States as a nation from the point of view of different museums because during the great industrial age there were lots of people who made lots of money and so in cities that are pretty poor now like Detroit there are great art collections because of Henry Ford and all of the philanthropists who lived in that region and what you see in that museum is a very just even content wise about what's important in American art is very different than what you see in New England for example so when I one of the paintings that I showed you or another slide I have is by John Singer Sargent who's you know Boston's master painter but you go to California and they don't know about John Singer Sargent so that's a trivial that's a content those are things about content but then it also would say something about how centrally you're connected to that part of history as opposed to in Texas which would be all about much more Texas's independence and stuff like that so it's a great it's a great question and maybe I'll write that book later on so I mean here is a great place to study that too sorry well now if you don't mind could you please talk a little bit about your personal motivation how you actually got engaged in the subject when you first started I mean in migration studies well mostly museums and diversity well the museum piece came from as I said spending many years studying migration from a transnational perspective and just feeling really frustrated that that still wasn't that kind of lens or gaze wasn't part of the mainstream conversation especially in the United States so you know most of the people studying immigration are interested in processes of integration, social inclusion assimilation whatever you want to call it and I just think that you can't understand those processes without at least looking at opening the lens and saying what if and how what's happening here is still affected by what's happening here that doesn't mean that I'm saying that it always is but I think that you have to ask the question that way so I got to a point in my own intellectual journey where I felt like why do we keep why are we still stuck in this and where would a different kind of vision of the nation come from and I started out originally interviewing immigrant writers and immigrant artists to find out like was there art about their homelands or you know was there art where did their art fall on the cause of polyton nationalism continuum I guess I could put it that way although I didn't think about it that way then and I just didn't get very far with that because it was I actually came to Spain to the Canary Islands and was interviewing people who are part of an exhibit on African art in the art the contemporary art museum there and I was asking them about you know where do they position themselves what is their art about who is their audience and they you know was a kind of predictable answer well if I call myself African this happens if I call myself immigrant this happens if I call myself black this happens in terms of getting included in certain kinds of expositions and things like that and I couldn't really figure out a creative way forward from that and so then I ended up at museums and I but I now I find myself very committed to teaching my students how to read power in spaces whether it be the bookstore you know where you can the same way that I was trying to get you to think about reading museums if I go into a bookstore and you can say how is this bookstore organized what are the categories that are being used what's inside the categories what's next to what category if I go this way in the bookstore what do I not see over here right and so or you can do that in the library or you can do that in the archive and we need to learn how to do that because that's how knowledge is being our gaze and our value system is being constructed by the way space is organized and the way knowledge is organized within that space and so if you if you wake up to that then you can sort of you know be be awake to it and then see what you want to try to do about it so hello talked a lot about museums kind of as a reflection of the community that they're placed in you know for instance putting museums that are about a certain community within their community where they are I was wondering if you've researched at all the opposite of museums creating the community around them in the sense of you know they have the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto which is a Mali Muslim museum that is now drawn as Mali Muslims from all around the world into the community around it and if you see this effect in those other museums you're talking about as a draw into the community and what kind of effect they create in the in that sense right well I do think that that's a you know by by creating some physical structure and calling it something you you it's like the center of a world right it has centrifugal is that the right word forces coming in right so I don't know about that example I'd love to hear more about it but for example in New York City I would say that's a more interactive kind of thing where you know it was formed by a Puerto Rican man who basically at first took boxes of archives and materials that he collected around to different schools but then when they finally got a building it was in the what was then you know a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood and then what's interesting there is how the museum has changed as the community has broadened so going from Puerto Rican to Dominican to Central American to Mexican and and it's really struggled with how to maintain its mission but also open it and every it's had a million directors and partly that's because of the director's vision about you know art is this an immigrant is this a museum for everyone because it's about the immigrant experience and the immigrant experience is a New York experience or does it need to stay Puerto Rican or can it be Caribbean or you know and so that's that's the interesting part about museums like that how they managed to stay agile when changing to the community around them yeah so when you're talking about like museums that can have more like a view that is not only from the national people but also people and then you talk about social economical classes so that most of the people who go to the museums are from a high social economical position yeah how do you find like in which ways could museums try to attract people that are not only from these high social economical positions like do you have any recommendations like for example policies for the cities that I don't know for example from the schools it's promoted or yeah yeah that's a great question too these are all good questions thank you well I think that's a big big discussion in the museum world because as I said in museums don't look enough like the people outside of museums and museums are aware of that especially museums that are privately funded so that depend upon ticket sales right and so what are you going to do about that so there's I see a whole range of strategies starting from you know making it mandatory for kids public schools to bring their or state supported schools bring school children to particular museums so you develop that habit whether your parents take you there or not in Qatar they were in Qatar part of the museum thing and was a way to attract attention and tourists and you know sort of a certain level of cultural capital but it was also because they realized that their economy which depends upon gas and oil is going to run out by 2030 I think they predicted so they want to switch to a knowledge based economy and part of a knowledge based economy is critical thinking and their thinking was that you learn art as part of that so there was a country where parents there were no museums to take kids to so you have to create this whole infrastructure from scratch right but then you also have to make them very welcoming so museums when I talked about that global museum knowledge one of the pieces of that is all kinds of public programming to get people to come into museums so one of them that I saw all around the world was like a big making a museum like a community center so it becomes like a festival so after hours you know a Friday night or a Saturday night or a family night where the museum is open from 5 o'clock to 11 o'clock and at the Brooklyn Museum which is one of the museums I studied they used to have people making it the neighborhood this is a museum that when it was first built was surrounded by wealthy people and then the neighborhood completely changed now it's completely changing back but they had to make themselves into a community center and make a decision are they going to compete with the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan or are they going to make their audience the community surrounding and they decided to make it the community surrounding so it was that neighborhood then Brooklyn then the rest of New York City and so every month they'd have this open house and there were concerts and dancing and all kinds of stuff to make people feel at home but then there's another thing you can do which is you know paint those restructure those galleries so you know how we're talking to you about what's in the gallery and what's in the center and what's you know in the back well they painted their gallery spaces blue and green rather than white and they put these big bean peg chairs on the floor so people could just calm and relax and it felt much more informal you know and then you know even things like what kind of text do you have on the wall and the various ways that you give people to so you know you know you can do the audio guide right usually now you can do things on your phone but in Singapore they have these sort of stand up things where it's a talking head but the talking head will talk to you briefly or you can dig deeper or you can dig deeper or you can dig deeper so this is kind of fun for a kid who's used to technology so all of these kinds of new things to make and then of course price like make it free right so because museums cost a lot of money in many places but I think whether they want to or whether they're doing it because they know it's the right thing to do or because they're being forced to do it I think most museums around the world are really thinking about this and another thing is to make sure that not just the visitors look like the people outside but the curators and the directors and so in New York City the current mayor made it mandatory did like a whole cultural auditing to see how diverse were the people in museums and I mean the administration of the museums and the professionals in the museum and trying because there are 31 institutions in New York City that get public funding and so they're supposed to be public serving and so he has some clout in terms of telling them what the administration should look like but that means you have to get people of color to go into fields like art history and curatorial studies so it's a whole kind of backlog that has to come forward so it's challenging but it is being done. Okay so this has been very very interesting and it's always great to listen to you talk about you know having all these conscience embedded in your work in terms of how we should look at things and talk about them but I wonder if I mean I think it's really important to continuously reflect on all this hegemony that we have in academia and especially how it affects also junior scholars because I think some place like Spain where there's been a lot of internationalization which has also led to a very strong emphasis on the kind of criteria in terms of impact factors and language that you mentioned before but how can we how can we both provincialize academia and keep and secure a common dialogue that's not quite clear to me so I'm not saying that what we have right now is particularly perfect because it's very top down it's very ordered but it's still important that we talk right across all these different perspectives and so I'm wondering how you see that because that isn't entirely clear to me how can we avoid that things become very fragmented when it's at the same time I think very important to also try to build no common ground. Why do you think that they'll become more fragmented? I mean what why does what I'm talking about lead to greater fragmentation because what I'm talking about is building other kinds of alternative venues that allow more people to join the conversation. Exactly and maybe that's my question more about what those venues would be that can manage you know the diversity and inclusivity that you're aiming for. Well I think what I'm learning here and these are just preliminary thoughts is that not everyone wants to like not all authors want to get to London or New York anymore that there is around the world an alternative space developing a south-south so I kind of went into this thinking well of course everyone wants to win the Nobel Prize and what I'm hearing is that not everyone does and so the terms of the debate are changing and the and who gets to not only who gets to determine what the finishing line is but where it is is changing and so I hear what you're saying about the fragmentation but I think it'll be concentrated fragmentation because it's not going to be I think about it sort of as highways and then country roads and so right now there's a lot of alternative stuff happening like let me give you an example from Argentina from the publishing world in Argentina so in Argentina most of the publishing world in Spanish is controlled in Spain and two very big mega corporations Planeta and Penguin Random House that are like consolidations of all these famous publishing houses that left Spain to go to Argentina some of them came back some of them started in Argentina and but now it's this powerful I can't think of figures off the top of my head but it's really striking how much the publishing world has dominated right but then at the same time you have this whole group of alternative independent presses that are some of them are publishing maybe ten books a year by hand they're really like art books but then some of them are doing a post-colonial move of saying we don't because basically a book that gets published in Argentina most books that get published in Argentina Madrid and Barcelona on the way to Mexico or Lima they don't go directly and that's what they're trying to avoid and so there's a whole alternative infrastructure happening here that is trying to that is a post-colonial project that's trying to circumvent that and how do you do that well you partner with small independent presses in these other countries to publish co-publish so that the book comes out both in Argentina and Colombia or you partner with a small independent press in the United States that translates it into English or maybe has a Spanish speaking consumer base right so it's not so fragmented but it's and this one is still much more powerful than this one but this one's serious and the goal of this one is not to get to be that one although this one is not to get to be that one so I guess I'm encouraged by all these alternative infrastructures and also alternative visions of what what it means to be successful you spoke especially about the knowledge and values that are put forward to build a nation but did you believe that want to distance themselves from this hegemony and that want to be visible in the public space to present the other also in museum rather than follow the national hegemony I'm sorry I don't understand the question you spoke here it's quite in Europe I mean in museum and there are artists I guess that want to make visible others that don't have a place maybe in museum and did you study this struggle maybe this strategies to make them or what those who are presented are others in the public space yeah so just like I answered this alternative structure in the publishing world there's also a parallel thing going on in the art world part of that comes from these biennials that are all over the world now so I don't know how familiar you all are with the art and publishing world but you know the Venice Biennial was the most famous original one and now there are biennials all over the world and often people often cities use that as a way to put themselves on the cultural map and so that is a kind of democratization and expansion of the same pathways and venues for exposition that I was describing in the publishing world in the art world and so there are these alternative spaces it's the same dilemma though there are these alternative spaces people so there are a lot of south initiatives for example in Beirut there's a place called Ashkhalawan that is kind of seen as a there was a lot of money given by foreign governments after the Civil War ended to promote art in Beirut as a way to consolidate the democracy and there were many alternative venues and this one really took off there's another one called the Beirut Art Center and now that but now those alternative spaces have become part of the mainstream so the curators who get who started those spaces she just was the curator at the Sharjah Biennial which at this point is now an important part of the mainstream art world but all that to say that they they have a sort of artist's residency and training program and they convene other like centers from other parts of the global south so trying to create this network where there's a something called the biennial sewer that comes out of Buenos Aires and that's like an alternative way of doing biennials that doesn't involve Venice, that doesn't involve Sharjah, that doesn't involve any of the mainstream ones so yes there is that and then it remains to be seen how alternative they can stay and whether people actually really don't want to go to Paris, they just say they don't want to get to Paris but they really do if they have the opportunity or whether there's going to be enough people who stick in this new space to make it like a viable competitive arena really. I just wanted to go back to this question about how museums were used as a let's say nation building tool and I was wondering because you said there's this third category of people who believe that museums can be changed let's say national museums or political museums but I was asking if you ever seen an example of this because we talk a lot about like alternative art centers or art spaces but is there actually an example that the national museum is trying to embrace their colonial past let's say and I'm thinking especially like the civilian example when you say that the migration was so subtle in the museums and I'm thinking like racism also very subtle in the space but sometimes not so much but I'm thinking like what does it say to us to have this migrant existence so subtle in the museum in the big museums. Well it's a step forward in the sense that before they didn't have anything right but can I think of examples I definitely can. Now does that mean that they are superficial or that they are indicative of deep institutional change and I think a lot of it's about a new generation of art historians who are getting trained in global art history rather than national art history so the new generation of curators there's a very big generational divide in most museums between kind of old school curators who want to know everything about their object and then others who have been trained more recently in more global connected approach so for them it's second nature and they're going to tell more of those stories less and they're going to tell reflexive stories about how are these objects acquired and they're looking for ways of co-owning those objects. Now museums like the British Museum there's a group of 25 museums that sign some kind of treatise that said we're universal museums we are the safeguarders of we're not British, we're universal, we are safeguarding humanity's patrimony so that's a way to opt out of having to give objects back but there are a lot of pressure about that and a lot of countries are demanding back their objects so at least we're in a period where I don't know how that's going to play out but at least we're in a period where the collections that museums have are being contested the way they're managed is it do you loan things back do you co-own them do you just send it back permanently what does it mean when you send back the Elgin marbles to Greece well Greece created this whole museum that's beautiful and is waiting for them but what happens when you send the Benin bronzes back to Benin you know I don't know the answer to that but I think those discussions are being are taking place so thank you so much for very inspiring talk my question was regarding when you talked about concepts and categories and vocabulary and this is like something that comes up to my mind very much like to what extent when we create like new vocabulary it gets somehow copied by the center like for instance concepts such as diversity or intersectionality that now it's like very trending then like for example with the feminist movement this we can see very clearly that there are like t-shirts in H&M that says like feminism so it's like how can we avoid like being dragged to the center without losing the concepts I don't know if I'm making myself clear but thank you I think it's a fundamental question and I don't think you can answer that question there's no one answer to that question and just like we're all going to decide differently how to respond so I don't have a lot of patience with definitional debates about what does this word mean what does this word mean I always tell my students you decide what you think it means and how you're using it and be able to say it because we could spend hours decide you know what is social inclusion compared to you know integration compared to assimilation and I don't find that very fruitful so I guess my answer is we all have to do this work in small steps in our own way and we all have different talents right not everyone can be a leader or we should have different ideas about what it means to be a leader that incorporate lots of different leadership styles so depending upon what your commitments are use day committed and like I'm saying some of these artists are going to stay within this alternative space and continue to contribute it to it for a very long time others the first opportunity they're going to jump ship and go into a more mainstream space that's life you know that's from like the first Adam from the black hole so maybe maybe we need a different question which is for each of us to decide how can I best contribute to this with the tools I have right now and knowing that how I feel about it now is going to change 10 years from now and that goes back to your question with which we began like I can say this stuff now because I'm a full professor and I don't have to worry about performing in a certain way and that's why I'm doing it but I understand that many of you in this room who want to go into academia if you do don't have that freedom so that means that I should be doing this at my stage or I can publish in Croatia and hardly anyone's going to see it but I need to do that because that's walking the walk and talking the talk right or so we each have different opportunities and challenges at different stages of our life plus our own cognitive styles and commitments and tools so I had one more question about you mentioned a couple times about how certain artifacts are being recalled back to countries but I've seen in a few places for example in Omotepe in Nicaragua people there on the island of Omotepe have made their own museum for their own artifacts that have been dug up there and taken by many Europeans they just take them back for free and so this idea of not just artifacts that are already on display going back to other national museums but back to the original people and I'm wondering if you've come run into that I know for example one way I've seen it the other way is in the anthropology museum in Mexico City they have the codices from all these indigenous villages on display and there's still the maps for how these villages are supposed to work how they resolve disputes and so people from those villages can go to the museum and consult these documents but they're not in the villages themselves so have you seen in any of this work around the world not just things going back to big museums but going back to people and then going on display and does that help or hurt I wonder when things go back to the original if it's like Zuni Pueblo out in New Mexico does that help Zuni Pueblo to have their artifacts back or is it better to be in a national museum or international museum where people do get a chance to be introduced to the Zuni culture I'm wondering how did you come across that or if you came across it in your work I wish I could say I saw more examples of community based efforts because it goes to your question before about other forms of other kinds of products that we make from our creative work or our intellectual work so oral histories people doing oral histories and collecting those and recording those and stuff are a very easy thing to do but is that going to be valued in the scholarly so that's another little intervention that we can do and if we keep doing it and keep doing it then it will become more common and more well known the point that you raised about that's the Neil McGregor from the British Museum his whole justification for keeping so many of the objects is that they won't be preserved here we've been preserving them for years and years and years and keeping them safe and they're still here and so many people come to London and there's some truth to that right but I also think about what does it mean when kids in Nigeria can go to their own national museum and see their own cultural production you know and how does that rob you of your sense of place in the world so I don't know the answer to that except you know making a big pot of money possible so that and training lots of people so that they could maintain these objects and you know for perpetuity right it feels like some of the Indigenous exhibitions and museum show that people are not allude to the fact that people are gone but that's the feeling I got when I was you know seven at the Field Museum was like all these people must not be here anymore that's why we have their clothes but I mean these cultures still exist so the pictures that I showed you of those kitschy burial urns that's a gallery that mixes old and new and you're really not sure what you're looking at whether it's historic or something you know from yesterday so but the stuff is in the Zuni Puep there's a tourism thing there you know so but that's pretty unique if you're talking about other communities that aren't tourist destinations then it's a different story I just study it I don't do it these decisions are really hard thank you very much for coming it was amazing thank you for listening