I have just spent 9 days in Alice Springs and 5 days at the Australian Museum and Galleries Association conference. While there I attempted to make progress on assignments and readings; related mostly to collection policy as that felt like the most relevant part of what I was studying in terms of what I was engaging in at the red centre.
Though the event focused mostly on museums the keynotes, workshops, and concurrent sessions were broadly applicable across the GLAM sector. A couple of key takeaways I have been ruminating on include:
A) the imperial origins of our information institutions constructed in the Western ideological ideal of taxonomic breadth, hierarchical control, and limited accessibility.
B) The unconscious privileging of male white voices over female black voices and how this is played out in the lives of our institutions and practitioners
I do not yet know how to confront these in my practice but I have been thinking about them more and more.