Collection Ecologies Holiday Gathering!
Memes, Memories, & Museum Hazards
As scholars studying natural history collections we intersect with all kinds of opportunities and challenges within museum spaces--from gaining access to collections or catalogues (if they exist), puzzling through institutional bureaucracy, and those joyous moments of serendipitous finds. For our last session of the year, we invite you all to join us for a momentary pause from work to connect, share, celebrate, and laugh with the Collection Ecologies working group community. To facilitate a conversation about our shared museum experiences, we will discuss a culturally significant aspect of digital media and communication, internet memes. Museums and other cultural institutions have tapped into this social forum through such meme hashtags as #MusMeme, #MuseumBums, and #MuseumHazards. Themes and sources drawn from museums, including specific objects and images, impact audience development and engagement with both the cultural benefits of museums, and ongoing thorny issues, such as repatriation and intellectual property. We will present a brief overview of the history of museum memes to consider how museums and heritage institutions might respond to popular memes, and how scholars might begin to approach memes as research subjects.
We would be thrilled if you wished to share your favourite meme, or an image from your scholarly endevours that made you laugh out loud, literally cry, or want to leave the archive. Please email Nuala at nfc231@nyu with your memes or images [with author credit] that will be shown during the session.