Sponsored by the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice
Thursday, May 8, 2025, 10am to 6pm
A virtual conference organized as part of the Simmons Center’s MA in Public Humanities course “Decolonization of Museums: Nations, Museums, Anti Colonialism and the Contemporary Moment.”
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world,
is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.
Fanon
In her book Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès speaks directly to practitioners within the realms of arts and culture to call for visionary, imaginative thinking in order to imagine arts, culture, heritage, and cultural spaces outside of the dominant world order created by colonial legacy. Rooted in theory from the Black radical tradition, she advocates for institutions by and for those who have been historically erased and exploited to maintain the apparatus of white western world order.
This conference asks: is it possible to transform cultural and academic institutions from sites of colonial harm into spaces of justice, care, and community? Bringing together museum professionals, scholars, artists, and community leaders, we explore how museums, archives, and institutions alike are confronting their colonial legacies towards reparative futures.
Through critical conversations and activities, sessions will examine challenges and possibilities for repatriation, community-driven exhibitions, archival intervention, and reimagining history telling. Topics include decolonization efforts across indigenous communities and university campuses, alternative practices that challenge the colonial violence of the archive, the nuances of representing Japanese American wartime incarceration, the role of Black artistic production and curatorial methods as a catalyst for political action during global crisis, and the complexities of aesthetics from a Black feminist lens to explore the possibilities of creating equity in arts institutions.
Through these topical sessions, attendees will explore a variety of ways that decolonial theory can be practiced from grass roots activism to hegemonic disruption—moving beyond symbolic gestures towards transformative, community-centered change.
A virtual conference organized as part of the Simmons Center’s MA in Public Humanities course Decolonization of Museums: Nations, Museums, Anti Colonialism and the Contemporary Moment.
