minutes

In Attendence 9/6:

I. Straughn S. Bonde S. Hamdy G. Borromeo S. Alcock O. Harmansah C. Whitmore R. Emblen S. Rockman K. Galor E. Colla D. Ng

The meeting started with introductions which demonstrated to bredth and commonalities in participants relationship to material culture studies. Interests included questions of technology, the body, collections, visualization, pedogogy of objects, cross-cultural comparisons, agency, actor-network theory and many other extensions related to the social biographies of things.

Participants have agreed on the dates for both the future fall term sessions as well as the April 18-19 date for the spring symposium.

Fall Sessions

The structure of the fall meetings will be organized around packets of readings on particular topics chosen by individual or groups of participants according to themes argreed to by the participants. This will allow us to share in the expertise of our members as well as provide fodder for discussion on topics of general interests. Packets should be some where in the range of four articles or possibly a monograph. As the spring Symposium will allow us to discuss in more depth our own individual research it was agreed that these discussions would be more general in their topical content (such as interdisciplinarity, the body, arcitecture as m.c., etc - see schedule).

We have left open the possibility of using these sessions as venues for one or two guest speakers or guest discussants to join the seminar. In particular several names of local scholars or those who we know will be visiting during the sessions have been suggested.

Participation

We have decided to limit participation in the working group to faculty while the spring symposium can include ABD graduate students as part fo the working group. This will give students a feel for how to engage in the kinds of discsussions where they see work in progress but allow the fall sessions to remain a "safe space" for faculty to engage with their colleagues.

As this seminar may well attract interest of faculty outside of Brown we have decided that this would be welcome. It would be a great benefit if this workshop would serve as a platform for further developing our relations with similar interests at other institutions. These may also be places for recruiting participants in the spring symposium.

Spring Symposium

The date has been set for April 18-19. On the 18th we will have a key note speaker (TBA) and the 19th will be a full day workshop of precirculated papers by members of the working group and a select number of outside participants. The target number is 10 with potential for no more than 12. There may be flexibility in the form of the papers (some might work as visualizations) but the goal is to use the workshop time for discussion rather than presentation. Those participants who are not planning to circulate their work will be engaged as discussants. Outside colleagues may well do double duty. Participants are encouraged to begin thinking about what role they would like to play and whehter or not they hope to circulate their research and in what format.

Wiki

This website will serve as our primary means of communication and dissemination of information advertisement and work product.

One call from the participants was to begin to build a bibliographic database of material culture studies. It will be the responsibility of all participants to play a role in that endevour as well as other pages such as links etc. Ian will serve as the main architect of the site but it is open for all to make their mark through the creation of new pages or links to their own research.

One major aspect where input is required is in building names and information on possible invitees to both the sessions and the spring symposium. Some names already suggested and whihc should go up on the correct page are:

Bjorner Olsen - already coming for a visit Tim Webmore - Stanford Peter Stelebrass (sp?) - Penn Jennifer Roberts - Art history - Harvard - packaging art objects Emily Martin - part of Sherine's lecture series Nadia Abu el-Hajj - coming for Elliotts MES series

Goals of the Workshop

Building interdisciplinary networks within brown and outside
Providing a forum for sharing of research and gaining from outside perspectives
Using the workshop as starting point for long-term institutional presence of Material Culture studies at Brown
having a good lunch and conversation with colleagues every other week or so

In thinking about the future of material culture at Brown mention was made of the program at UCL as one model, Schiffer's program at Arizona that deals more with performance studies, and some of the work of STS departments (Cornell?) that bring together engineers and archaeologists in some interesting ways.