Anthropological Knowledge Dissemination aims at providing the students with both theoretical and practical knowledge of how to disseminate anthropological questions through different media and to different audiences. Students are split into four media groups where they will delve into different ways of disseminating through audio, images, text and objects. This activity is related to the latter media group - objects.
The course emphasises the importance of group work as the students are challenged to create an exhibition for a museum during the duration of the course.
This activity attempts to teach students how meanings can be derived from closely engaging with objects. Working with in-depth object analysis, the students will be discovering the many different ways in which objects can make meaning by themselves and in relation to other objects and their surroundings. This activity is oriented towards students working with museums, anthropology, archaeology and heritage, or other places where objects can play a central role for analyses and discussion.
This activity was created as a way of inviting students to think about things; to make objects a part of their analytical work and making materiality visible to the students outside the course as well. The activity encourages the students to ‘make mistakes’ – to find the models difficult or unable to provide the framework for their understanding of their objects. In this way, the students learn to critically engage with the models and create new ideas for how they will use objects in their own projects.
In the Anthropological Knowledge Dissemination course, this activity has gotten the most praise from students in evaluations. This is because it forces them to use what they have read for other lessons to actively engage with their own objects in a way that prepares them not only for the exam, but also for the more immediate challenge of creating a museum exhibition in 4-5 weeks.
This activity provides those students who have not worked analytically with objects before with a new language for discussing and thinking about things. This language is especially relevant for students working with museums, but also as a way of easing students into theories of materiality that can be useful in other parts of their studies.
The purpose is to teach the students to make objects a part of their analytical work and making materiality visible to the students outside the course as well.
Pearce, S. 1994 ”Thinking about things” in S. Pearce (ed.) Interpreting Objects and Collections. London and New York: Routledge.
