The Turtle Garden: Tan Kah Kee’s last spiritual world

Abstract

This paper explores the role of diasporic subjects in China’s heritage-making through a case study of the Turtle Garden built by Tan Kah Kee in Xiamen, China. Tan is the first person with Overseas Chinese background who built museums in the P.R. China and has been regarded as a symbol of Overseas Chinese patriotism. This paper argues that the Turtle Garden, conceptualised as a postcolonial ‘carnivalesque’ space, is more than a civic museum for public education. It reflects the owner’s highly complex and sometimes conflicting museum outlook embedded in his life experience as a migrant, his encounter with (British) colonialism in Malaya, and integrated with his desire and despair about the Chinese Communist Party’s nation-building project in the 1950s. Rather than a sign of devotion to the socialist motherland as simplistically depicted in China’s discourse, the garden symbolises Tan’s last ‘spiritual world’ where he simultaneously engaged with soul-searching as a returned Overseas Chinese and alternative diasporic imagining of Chinese identities and nation. It brings to light the value of heritage-making outside centralised heritage discourses, and offers an invaluable analytical lens to disentangle the contested and ever shifting relationship between diasporic subjects, cultural heritage and nation-(re)building in the Chinese context and beyond.     

The impacts of parental migration on children’s subjective well-being in rural china: a double-edged sword

ABSTRACT

The emerging problem of left-behind children has attracted mounting academic and policy attention. Prior studies primarily cast light on left-behind children’s education, health, and behavior, while their subjective well-being is much less understood yet. Based on a nationally representative sample of rural children aged 10–15 in 2014, we examine the impacts of different types of parental migration on children’s subjective well-being and how these affects vary between boys and girls. The results show that parental migration is a double-edged sword: children from both-parent migrant families report compromised life satisfaction and relationship quality compared with those in integral families, and mother-only migration significantly lowers children’s subjective health. On the flip side, father-only migration enhances children’s aspiration for attaining college, an encouraging effect that is even stronger than that of parental education and family income. These effects are heterogeneous by children’s gender: boys seem to be more susceptible to the disruptive effects of both-parent migration; mother-only migration effectively promotes girls’ educational aspiration while father-only migration promotes boys’. This study portrays a comprehensive image of left-behind children. Relaxation of hukou restriction, equal access to education, and revitalization of rural economies are imperative to improve the well-being of left-behind children.

Abbreviations: LBC: Left-behing children; SWB: subjective well-being     

‘Nature makes people happy,that’s what it sort of means:’ children’s definitions and perceptions of nature in rural Northwestern Ontario

ABSTRACT

Nature exposure positively impacts children’s physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive health and development. We know less about how children perceive their connection with nature and what nature means to them. This study uses focus groups to understand how rural Canadian children define, experience, and perceive benefits of nature. Using thematic analysis, we identified three primary themes. First, while children associate nature with specific activities, natural elements, and locations, they also conceptualize nature as ‘a whole community.’ Second, children experienced nature through doing, highlighting how activities connected them with nature while recognizing constraints on those engagements. Finally, children demonstrated agency in accessing nature to improve their emotional states. These findings indicate that from children’s views, nature is more than just space with natural elements. Children are also knowledgeable about the health benefits of nature, and capitalize on this knowledge. These findings can inform interventions to increase children’s interactions with outdoor environments.     

Speaking for the past in the present: Text,authority and learning in archaeology museums

Abstract

This paper examines the development of debates surrounding the nature of curatorial authority and of public education in archaeology museums, with particular reference to texts accompanying exhibitions of prehistoric material in England and Scotland. Traditionally, such texts have been conceived of as authoritative aids to museum education and communication. However, since the late 1980s, they have been criticised, particularly on the grounds of curatorial bias and inaccessibility. As a consequence, a new ‘cultural approach’ to museum texts was developed in the 1990s, based upon curatorial principles of critical awareness and public responsibility. The resultant texts have received mixed responses from museum archaeologists and visitors, whose perspectives reflect contemporary political tensions in Britain. They also highlight the fundamental question of the future status and role of text in museums. The answer proposed here is that texts, although not entirely popular with visitors, will remain key elements of archaeology museum displays, and that differences of curatorial approach and opinion, as expressed through texts, are beneficial to learning in archaeology museums.     

Museum salvage: A case study of Mesoamerican artifacts in museum collections and on the antiquities market

Abstract

Museum salvage refers to critical studies of museum collections with little or no provenience information that seek to glean useful archaeological information from these artifacts and examine the nature of their origins and possible connections to the illicit antiquities trade and the art market. Our case study focuses on artifacts from Mesoamerica and objects from the ancient capital of Teotihuacan in particular. We take a multi-scalar approach, including a quantitative analysis of Sotheby’s auction records for Mesoamerican items from 1966 to 2010, a survey of Teotihuacan attributed items in U.S. museums, and a more detailed examination of Teotihuacan-style artifacts in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science collections. The study tracks and attempts to explain diachronic patterns in the Mesoamerican antiquities trade, connections to museum collecting practices, and looting behavior. The study illustrates the potential benefits of museum salvage, while also revealing the clear limitations of research on poorly documented archaeological material.     

Reciprocity and visual methods in cross-cultural research with Cambodian schoolgirls

ABSTRACT

Secondary schoolgirls’ experiences of persisting at school in rural Cambodia were the focus of this study. The study worked with 43 schoolgirls from two state-run schools. This paper reflects on how reciprocity and visual methods enabled the work of hearing the schoolgirls’ voices across language and cultural barriers. Reciprocity was a central concern and took the form of collaborative knowledge building to establish trustworthiness, as well as various reciprocal acts that ‘gave back’ to those involved in the study. The use of visual methods, such as visual narratives, self-managed video interviews, and advice posters sought to mitigate power differentials, address language barriers, and recognise schoolgirls as experts in girls’ education. The paper discusses the advantages and constraints of this innovative approach, and proposes that cross-cultural research that provides girls with autonomy during the research process is necessary if those working with girls seek to valorise girls’ voices and experiences.     

‘That street is taking us to home’: young children’s photographs of public spaces

ABSTRACT

Children’s identities constitute and are constituted by the everyday spaces they inhabit. Though there are innumerable accounts of what adults think public spaces like subways and city streets mean to children, fewer recorded accounts exist from young children themselves (Faulkner and Zolkos 2016, “Introduction.” In Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity, ix–xvii. Lexington: Lanham.). In this work I explored 2- – 5-year-old children’s conceptions of public space through the photographs they took and the narratives they told in and around those images. I focused on how children imaged their spaces, how their narrative fragments added layers of story to the images’ contents, and how their photographic performances acted as ‘visual voice’ (Burke 2005, “‘Play in Focus’: Children Researching Their Own Spaces and Places for Play.” Children Youth and Environments 15 (1): 27–53.), highlighting for us how they see themselves and their positions within the larger urban environment. The young children’s photographs depicted their growing autonomy and mobility within an urban context, attunements to non-human forms of the city, and knowledge of what it means to live in their communities.     

By the People,for the People. The Case of a Community Museum of Traumatic Greek Heritage

Abstract

This article will delineate the history and activities of the Museum of Political Exiles of Ai Stratis in Greece. The museum was founded in the 1980s by a group of former inmates who were banished in the North Aegean island of Ai Stratis, a site of political confinement between 1920s and 1960s. Since its inception, the museum has aspired to be a platform of communication, a place of healing that is by the people for the people. The aim here is to examine how this was achieved and what lessons have been learned from the endeavours of an organization that deals with a rather traumatic chapter of modern Greek history. Emphasis will be placed especially on what role the subjects of history have assumed in the design of the permanent exhibition and the educational and cultural activities.     

PROJECTIONS OF RACE,NATURE, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC CHILDHOOD IN EARLY EDUCATIONAL CINEMA AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CANADA

In this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as Other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.     

博物馆教育性格的养成——从《美国博物馆:创新者和先驱》一书谈起

与欧洲博物馆强调皇家收藏与民众教化的传统不同,美国的博物馆性格立足于社会教育与公众服务。自初创之日起,"教育至上"的性格一直贯穿美国博物馆发展的始终,由此养成的有关博物馆教育议题的思考成为国际博物学界的典范。爱德华·亚历山大在《美国博物馆:创新者和先驱》一书中系统考察了13位美国博物馆领军人物的超前理念和伟大事迹,他们无一例外地都在强调博物馆教育和公众娱乐的重要性,并在"教育至上"的博物馆性格上达成共识。这些先驱们在博物馆平台上发挥才智、创造典范的经验材料对于理解美国博物馆教育性格生成与演变的具体过程与整体图式具有举足轻重的作用。     

Shared heritage,shared authority,shared accountability? Co-generating museum performance criteria as a means of embedding ‘shared authority’

Abstract

This New Zealand case study presents insights from the perspectives of Māori and non-Māori museum stakeholders. It aimed to understand which activities and responsibilities mattered to stakeholders, in order to develop more meaningful accountability for their shared heritage. Using a participatory mixed method, the research explored how museum stakeholders assess their museum’s performance. Māori and non-Māori generated, sorted and rated 'possible performance statements’. A cultural analysis, using proprietary software, produced concept maps which illustrate differently nuanced museum constructs with different relative importance for constituent elements. Pattern-matching revealed divergent priority accorded certain museum activities, but also commonalities. Both cultural groups prioritised factors not generally featured in compliance-driven approaches to accountability reporting. For Māori, greatest importance was placed on care of taonga (‘treasures’), Māori-specific practice and engagement with Māori, while collections and staff were the key assessment factors for non-Māori. Incorporating stakeholder perspectives in a museum performance framework provides opportunities to report performance on dimensions which matter to wider communities. Where shared authority is taken seriously and stakeholders are involved, accountability becomes meaningful. This collaborative approach to performance framework development offers a tool for embedding the realities of shared authority into planning and delivering the museum’s activities and responsibilities.     

Retrieving the Cultural Biography of a Gun

Abstract

The meanings of objects change as the people with whom they are associated change. Over the course of an artefact’s existence, the sum of these meanings constitutes a cultural biography, a life-story of the item. This is the case with objects associated with conflict, just as with those from other contexts; in this case, cultural biographies can have sharply contrasting phases. However, identifying the object in each of its changing relationships with people can be problematic. In the case of a World War I German 150 mm gun, that is one of the few of its type remaining in the world, this has been achieved by comparison of detailed characteristics, markings, and battle damage with historical photographs and surviving documentation. By these means, its role in the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, and after its capture by the Australian Corps, can be pieced together. The biography of such a gun can include manufacturing technology, a means of destruction, a valued war trophy, a public exhibit, a neglected relic, a source of scrap metal, a museum showpiece, and even a children’s plaything, but the gun investigated here was more fortunate. It is preserved in a museum, although its relationship to people could continue to change.     

Captain Cook upon Changing Seas: Indigenous Voices and Reimagining at the British Museum

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the British Museum exhibition, Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives, 29 November 2018–4 August 2019. It situates the exhibition within a global context of exhibitions held around the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage, and critically considers its attempt to reframe dominant narratives surrounding Cook, his voyages and more broadly the colonization of the Pacific through a focus on Pacific Islander perspectives within a changing museum sector.     

Island Networks and Missionary Methods: Locating Charles E. Fox and Frederick G. Bowie in the History of Pacific Archaeology

ABSTRACT

‘Missionary’ and ‘archaeology’ may appear incongruous partners within contemporary archaeological practice, but archival, museum and oral sources reveal historical connections. This paper explores two missionaries, active in the western Pacific from 1896 to 1973. Reverends Charles Elliot Fox (Melanesian Mission, Solomon Islands) and Frederick Gatherer Bowie (Free Church of Scotland Mission, Vanuatu) both conducted studies related to the prehistory and migration of Pacific people. Both produced material assemblages, as well as textual and visual documents, and formed ideas influenced by their own networks and self identities. The paper examines their data collection methods and relationships with others, considering particularly how their relationships with Pacific Islanders and with psychologist and ethnologist W.H.R. Rivers influenced the missionary research process. By understanding these aspects of their work, Fox and Bowie can be placed within a broader genealogy of Anglophone missionary archaeology dating back to the late 18th century.     

‘Now they’re coming after our schools’: interrogating urban intimacies of children and displacement

ABSTRACT

Education scholars grappling with policy issues related to community and identity issues may pay attention to the work of emotion. Rationalist, psychological frameworks that bound many educational researchers’ policy analyses are limited in scope: the policy process is seen as a linear cause-and-effect process. A feminist geographic attention to this research offers a more complex understanding of the experiences of policy. Using children’s displacement by gentrification as an example, this commentary will show how a feminist geographic understanding of place attachment offers a more complete understanding of the effects of gentrification. Specifically, using the concept of the ‘intimate city’, I show how the global process of gentrification is entangled with the intimate embodiment of emotions. And in order to effectively study education policy, we must be attuned to how children embody their emotions.     

Facetiming common worlds: exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones

ABSTRACT

Children, educators, and researchers at a child care center in Victoria, Canada and Melbourne, Australia have been collaborating on an early childhood education pedagogical inquiry project that grapples with children’s relations with place and technologies. Resisting narratives of environmental stewardship and instrumental digital education that dominate in the settler colonial contexts of contemporary Canadian and Australian early childhood education, this article shares stories, practices, questions, and tensions generated within the inquiry. After outlining how we think with Facetime on iPhone within a common worlds pedagogies framework, we detail two practices generated in the inquiry: (1) exchanging digital place stories and (2) crafting pedagogical contact zones with place and technologies. These practices, we argue, make visible how our collaboration reconfigures children’s relationships with place and technologies in consequential ways, and risks generating uneasy, unfamiliar, and tentative pedagogies that respond to messy entanglements within digital, more-than-human common worlds.     

时代、文化资本与支配权:对张謇创办南通博物苑的再思考

面对19世纪末中国空前的民族危机和剧遽社会变迁,张謇选择了"实业救国"、"教育救国"的道路。南通博物苑作为张謇教育事业的重要组成部分,是其教育救国思想的具体体现。张謇在南通博物苑创办过程中实现了资本的文化化和文化的资本化双重过程:一方面,将经济资本转化为文化资本;另一方面,又将文化资本转化为其象征资本的一部分,使其获得更大社会权力,从而能够按照自己的政治理想对地方社会进行塑造。张謇对于作为文化资本的南通博物苑的支配主要体现在三个方面:藏品内容及知识系统的构建、博物馆教育作用的树立及对参观者的规范。张謇对文化资本的支配表面上是其个人意志的体现,由其政治理念所驱动;而深究,终不免受时代和机构属性等因素的制约与影响。     

‘We’re not very good at soccer’: gender,space and competence in a Victorian primary school

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on findings from a pilot project conducted at an inner city primary school in Melbourne, Australia. Inviting grade six girls and boys (aged eleven and twelve) to focus on spaces of their schoolground, we learned about the ways in which gender, age, ethnicity, language ability and sporting competence influenced active play and belonging. Informed by the understanding that schoolgrounds, gender and active play are socially constructed, and children are active agents in these constructions, the paper examines how girls and boys consider and negotiate spatial politics. The methods of participant-led photography, focus groups and thematic analysis, reveal how children understand gendered spatialities. A strong story emerged of girls’ experience of exclusion from active play spaces in particular, providing a perspective on the spatial and social performance of gender. The findings highlight the value of integrating a spatial analysis of schoolgrounds – and the gendered dynamics therein – for health, education and equity programmes.     

Historical empathy in a museum: uniting contextualisation and emotional engagement

Museums, memorial centres and other heritage institutions use various strategies to evoke an emotional response that serves to elicit empathy with the historical events and actors that are portrayed in exhibitions. To increase historical understanding, however, both emotional engagement with and contextual understanding of these historical figures are needed. Using the concept of historical empathy, this paper examines the continuous interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of history learning in museums. We conducted a case study at Museon in The Hague, the Netherlands. We studied a learning session on children living through the Second World War, the museum’s strategies employed in the exhibition, the entrance narratives of secondary school students participating in the session and their engagement with the exhibition and with the educational activities. While most of the students did not feel related to WWII prior to their museum visit, the museum managed to engage many of them with personal stories and artefacts and by offering multiple and new perspectives. Our findings underscore the interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of historical empathy and show that museums can serve as powerful contexts for developing this skill among school students.     

Middle of nowhere: contesting rural heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum

Abstract

The World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Alberta, Canada, is a rural museum located in a relatively isolated hamlet of less than 200 people. Inside the museum, small diorama boxes feature taxidermied gophers dressed in tiny clothing and posed as townspeople dining in restaurants, shooting pool and chatting at a beauty parlour, among other activities. Drawing on methods stemming from critical museum theory, critical rural studies and critical heritage studies, this article analyzes the ways in which both local residents and visitors from outside the region understand the museum, considering why it is indeed world famous, attracting over 5000 international tourists each year. It argues that the Gopher Hole Museum succeeds in part because its organisers are active agents who take pride in the museum without attempting to refute the sometimes negative responses to it, or control the ways in which outsiders interpret it. The museum in Torrington is a complex ‘open text’ that both employs and critiques the conventional methods used in natural history and heritage museums to offer multiple narratives about childhood, heritage and rural life, addressing local people as well as tourists.