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Biomedicine in museums

'Wandering seminar' om 'scientific objects' besøger Medicinsk Museion, 9. – 11. maj 2006

By November 7, 2005No Comments

Her kommer så lidt mere fyldig information om det planlagte ‘Wandering seminar’, som kommer til København den 9.-11. maj 2006:

Medicinsk Museion skal være en af ca. 10 ‘besøgsstationer’ for et planlagt kringrejsende europæisk phd/postdoc-seminar arrangeret af Max Planck Research Network ‘Scientific Objects’.

Netværket består af en række europæiske forsknings- og museumsinstitutioner (se mere om netværket her). Ét af virkemidlerne består i at sende en gruppe phd- og postdoc-studerende fra medlemsinstitutionerne rundt til forskellige forskningsinstitutioner og museer, der arbejder med videnskabshistorie, herunder de medicinske videnskabers historie, og de objekter som hører til.

På et planlægningsmøde i Berlin den 2. september besluttede netværket bl.a. følgende om det første ‘wandering seminar’:

“The discussion enlarged the scope of what might count as a scientific object for the purposes of the seminar beyond the kinds of objects that might typically be found in a museum of science and technology. Examples included working collections of scientists (botanical herbaria, mathematical models, anatomical models), books as material objects, images used as working objects, and, more broadly, epistemic objects (climate, race) that become the focus of scientific inquiry through complex historical processes – all of which clearly fall under the account of ‘The History of Scientific Objects’ given in the original research proposal. We decided that the epistemic objects and images probably deserved projects in their own right … while working collections and books should form part of the wandering seminar, alongside museum collections. A number of points were raised that might also be topics of discussion within the seminar: the difficulty of dealing with twentieth-century scientific instruments; the relationships between scholars and curators; the perspective of free lance exhibition planners; the exhibition (or website or film) as a new kind of scholarly publication; the challenge of designing an exhibition that met the highest scholarly standards (and of writing reviews that would do justice to such an exhibition); the increasing importance of museums as sites of scholarly research (and hence of employment) beyond the university. Since there is no need to standardize the content and format of the various weeks of the seminar, individual institutions would have considerable latitude as to which of these themes (and of course others) they wished to take up with the seminarians … Finally, it was repeatedly emphasized that the process and outcome of the seminar must be innovative research (not just innovative pedagogy)”.

Det lyder måske ikke særligt konkret. Koordinatoren, Hanna Lotte Lund, skriver lidt mere i en mail:

“Unfortunately, there is no syllabus, yet. As the whole Wanderseminar is the first of its kind, it will also be an experiment; on the 1st meeting in september the members agreed that it will mainly be up to the “stations” what they like to show and discuss. I enclose the minutes of this meeting for a quick idea of what was in the discussion. As soon as I have information from the Stations on their programm I will keep you informed immediately. From what I know now, München has planned to work with their (known and unknown) collections, in Zürich and Basel the focus will probably be on pictures and in Paris the Seminarians will work at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle and the INRA (Agronomical research). The basic idea of this teaching experiment is to give junior scholars in the history of science the opportunity to get an overview of the latest developments in the research on Scientific Objects AND to get a firsthand impression of how scientific exhibitons are developed in the 21st century. Each of the students, after the journey, is asked to write the biography of and present one object he or she chooses to work on. So, both your ideas of involving the students in discussions of an exhibition-in-the-making and the focus on biomedicine sound really perfect to me”.

Det hele er altså et forskeruddanneleseksperiment, og det står os frit at udvikle vores eget koncept i form af et besøgsprogram for de tre dage her i København, der både kan sælge Museion-konceptet til en række europæiske søsterinstitutioner og forhåbentlig give os værdifuld feedback.

Det hele skal foregå i perioden 1. maj – 21. juni 2006 med følgende foreløbige rundrejseprogram:

May 1st – May 6th Deutsches Museum, München
May 9th-May 11th Medicinsk Museon, Cph
May 15th-21th Cambridge, UK
May 22th/May 23th London (?)
May 24th-28th ??
May 29th- 4th June Paris (?)
June 5th-11th Berlin
June 12th-15th Florence and Pisa
June 19th-21th Zurich

Jeg foreslår at vi diskuterer sagen lidt uformelt i de næste par måneder, og tager et konkret forslag til besøgsprogram op på et intern-seminar i begyndelsen af 2006.
(se også næste indlæg)

Thomas Söderqvist

Author Thomas Söderqvist

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