The global movements and histories of people leave numerous traces in the communities, landscapes, objects and practices they create, ranging from the mundane to the monumental. In this way, migration and heritage are inscribing practices – that is, material practices of making events, ideologies and processes visible, mobile and durable – as they imprint the world with histories of human movements and productions. For instance, architecture can articulate a history of contact or migration preserved in visual and structural form; museum collections can provide a distinctive material and visual accounts of colonial and post-colonial practices; and immigration forms and procedures can mediate a technology of governmental control as well as a significant transition in an individual’s personal biography. This seminar series will forefront the assemblages of actors, ideologies, and materials that constitute global interactions. The group will cultivate discussions around the materials out of which migration histories and heritage practices emerge, and the social worlds and relationships they make possible as well as constrain.

2011-2012 Program:

Wednesday, September 14th - Kick-off lecture - Dr. Wayne Modest (Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam): Objects in Limbo - Towards a Museology of Displacement

Monday, October 10th - Dr. Marieke Bloembergen and Dr. Martijn Eickhoff (KITLV, Leiden): Save Borobudur! The moral dynamics of heritage formation in Indonesia across orders and borders, 1930s-ca. 1990

Friday, December 2nd - Dr. Alexander Geurds (Archaeology, Leiden University): Tracing the fixing agent: On Americanist archaeology’s contemporary engagement with boundary, process and practice

Friday, February 10th - Discussion with Arjen Oosterman, Vincent Schipper and Edwin Gardner: The changing idea of heritage in architecture

Friday, March 2nd - Dr. Paul Basu (Anthropology and Material Culture Studies, University College London)

Friday, April 13th - Dr. Renzo Duin (Archaeology, Leiden University)

Friday, May 4th - Dr. Hester Dibbits (Museology, Reinwardt Academie Amsterdam)

Friday, June 1st - Dr. Sabine Luning (FSW, Leiden University)

The LSGI takes place from 13:30 to 15:00 at Gravensteen, Pieterskerkhof 6, Room 11 (map). There is no need to register in advance. A working paper will be posted on the website one week prior to the seminar.