Week 7: Thoughts on My Project Scope
Wow is it already week 7?
I have definitely been thinking more about my project these past two weeks as I participated in two intensives – Indigenous Futures and Neuropolitics of Decision Making. Writing my Exclusion and Inequality essay also provided me with some food for thought.
As you may recall one of the project ideas I was thinking about was how I could make the process of repatriation more transparent and easier to navigate for Indigenous peoples. One of the main focus areas of the Indigenous Future course is repatriation, and I will be writing a paper on this topic. I have done some initial research and found out the following: most foundation-run museums find it harder to repatriate objects for legal reasons. There are usually caveats when private donors provide their collections to the foundations or restrictions on how the collections can be used. Apparently one of the main issues that the British Museum refuses many requests is for legal reasons. (Although the UK Parliament could enact a law that would override the wishes of these private collectors from what I understand). Government-run museums may have more leeway to make decisions to repatriate. Another interesting issue that arose during the intensives which I heard from a classmate was that if a digital copy is made who really owns that digital copy and all the information related to it. According to UNDRIP, Indigenous peoples should have ownership over all of it.
Another challenge has been finding people who are willing or able to speak with me about the project. There is no way that I can execute a project like this without some assistance from museum staff (who are extremely busy and suffer from lack of funding). As well, I since I don’t have any funding of my own, it’s hard to ask Indigenous people to donate their time to the project. I have not approached anyone I know yet in the local First Nations as I don’t want to take up their time unnecessarily so I want to be sure this the path I wish to go down.
During Neuropolitics, we explored a few topics such as how people’s decision-making process work when they decide who to vote for, what type of policies to support, or even how this research can be used to influence political campaigns or people’s sentiments about current issues. This was extremely intriguing to me and is still an area I am thinking of basing part of my project around – I may even be able to use it in conjunction with the idea of repatriation. Perhaps I can figure out how to change people’s attitudes towards the self-determination and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, so there is more public support or pressure to create policies or laws that enable repatriation work.
Lastly, when writing my paper for Exclusion and Inequality, I realized maybe I should look at acting on some of the main issues of exclusion of Indigenous peoples first, since if one of the potential solutions is digital repatriation, we need to build the digital capacity of Indigenous peoples. According to Sora and Park, digital inclusion means improving access, digital literacy, and funding. So for my next phase of thinking around my project work, I would like to explore more how to address digital capacity of Indigenous peoples to see if digital repatriation is actually going to be helpful or a good idea.
Regarding methods for my project’s research, I have been interviewing people I know with a background in this research, and plan to follow up with my course instructors or teaching assistants to get some advice as well. I have also been reading up on the laws related to museums in Canada and researching different museums for their repatriation policies.
I still feel like I am formulating ideas rather than digging deep into them. Since I am on a two year part-time schedule I think this is ok, but I am hoping to dig a bit deeper into my topic as I work on my next two graded submissions for the above-mentioned courses.
#magenta
About funding, it might worth taking a look at the Moray Endowment Fund offered by the university. I was awarded this fund to support my survey with Chinese queer women in my 2nd year of PhD. They did not, however, say that this funding is for PhD student and staff exclusively. https://www.ed.ac.uk/research-office/winning-research-funding/develop-idea/seed-funding/moray-endowment-fund.
Hi Darcie, lots of good ideas, but lots of hurdles to. Have you read examples of pieces/objects that were repatriated that detail the process and/or specify who organized and/or who sponsored it (on the receiver side)? Maybe you’ve already run this down, but individuals who fought and won may be very willing to share their opinions/frustrations on what aspects of the process blocked them from success. Although improving repatriation would be awesome, simply good analysis of the barriers against inequality and exclusion concepts may be a good contribution – or if that exists, a closer look at one of those aspects. One thing that comes to mind is just the focus on policy — the vulnerable population is on the losing end by having to navigate multiple legal/policy structures within and between (much more powerful and wealthy) nations — not of which represent their nation. Same concepts that are likely better documented with respect to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, etc.. Have you read Loot? #magenta