Join a free online roundtable event with Dr Kandida Purnell on ‘Curating Conflict’
Dr Kandida Purnell, Assistant Professor of International Relations at Richmond, will be joining an illustrious panel of speakers at a British International Studies Association (BISA) eventin October which is free to anyone interested in attending.
‘Curating Conflict: Political Violence in Museums, Memorials, and Exhibitions’ will be held online on Friday 9 October at 2.00pm BST. In addition to Dr Purnell, who is an International and Security Studies expert, the roundtable will gather other internationally renowned scholars to discuss their recent work on the curation of conflict in various parts of the world.
BISA outlines why this discussion is so relevant to our world today.
During the recent Black Lives Matter protests, the toppling of statues and defacing of monuments has put sites of collective memory at the heart of public debate on both sides of the Atlantic. These unfolding events can be helpfully read through the growing body of International Relations scholarship that theorises sites of memory, including museums, memorials, and exhibitions, as sites of transnational communication and democratic dialogue about political violence.
Register for this free event here.
The event is also being held to launch a double special issue of the journal ‘Critical Military Studies’ on the topic of ‘Curating Conflict’ to which Dr Purnell has contributed a recently published article with Natasha Danilova of University of Aberdeen on, ‘The museumification of the Scottish soldier and the meaning-making of Britain’s wars’.
The abstract for the article expands this theme:
Drawing on interviews with curators of Scotland’s military museums and fieldwork ethnographies, this article explores how the Scottish Soldier is enacted through curation and how, through artefacts and stories, curators (re)produce the Scottish Soldier within and through their museums’ spaces.
