Open Museum for Open Science for an Open Society

Project lead: Prof. Dr. Karoline Noack; Prof. Dr. Birgit Ulrike Münch

Researchers: Elisabeth Stauß; Dr. des. Carlos Pallan Gayol; Edouard Grigowski

Links: Forschungsprofil — Universität Bonn (uni-bonn.de)

University collections as heritage include present and past negotiations around objects, related practices, forms of knowledge, as well as temporal, spatial, social, cultural, and political contexts of origin as the research object of TRA 5. Heritage in its broadest sense is a concept whose emergence and institutionalization dates back to modernity and the founding of nation-states in the 19th century and thus draws heavily on European value systems. Especially through research on provenance and restitution of collections, including university collections, TRA 5 sets out to deconstruct this official heritage discourse, to let societies of origin and other groups actively participate in shaping it, and thus to find new forms of dealing with heritage. The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, ratified in 2003, placed the participation of communities at the center of its activities for the first time in comparison to the 1972 Convention, and from then on opened up the hitherto static material world heritage, represented in particular by Europe, to cultural practices, forms of knowledge and representations from the so-called global South. With the FARO Convention, the Council of Europe emphasizes the 3 importance of heritage for society and sees it as an instrument of democracy and respect for human rights.

The aim of the TRA 5 is thus a critical description of communicative forms of interaction as well as practices of heritage in order to reveal the interdependence between both concepts themselves and their perception, representation and interpretation as well as historically developed power relations. In order to overcome or at least mitigate the prevailing Eurocentric approach to the study of forms of communication and heritage, we want to question and redefine the boundaries of the inherited disciplinary traditions, which are essentially set by European research disciplines. In this way, the interactions between past and present can be addressed in an innovative way.