Monday April 8: COLLECTING EARTH
Rather than meeting in-person today, you should be watching the total solar eclipse! In lieu of our regular afternoon gathering, I’ve prepared a video lecture summarizing some key themes that today’s assigned texts — and this week’s historic geological and astronomical events — will prompt you to ponder.
When do biological and geological materials become media — embodiments of data that help us understand natural processes, environmental history, or climate change, for instance — and how are they collected and studied?
To Do Before Today’s Class:
- Read Shannon Mattern, “The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments,” Places Journal (November 2017).
- Introduce yourself to Penn’s Morris Arboretum, a collection of trees-as-media — and as mediators between people and place. Relatedly, read Zoey Poll, “Where the Rare Citrus Grows,” The New York Times Style Magazine (February 24, 2021) [if you hit a paywall, access the Times through PennLibraries’ website].
- Watch “Global Seed Vault Becomes More Important as Climate Changes,” PBS (April 4, 2023) [7:13].
Wednesday April 10: COLLECTING BODIES
Content Warning: We’ll be addressing an important and sensitive subject today, and attendance is optional. We’ll consider how the colonial museum has regarded marginalized humans as “specimens,” and equated human remains with “media” or “data.”
Local Field Trip: Penn Museum
Please gather in the East Entrance. All students need to tap their Penn cards at the desk as they arrive and put belongings into lockers there. The class will be held in our Collections Study Room, where we can only allow students to use pencils or tablet computers. Please aim to arrive on time, so we can all head back to the Study Room as a group!
We’ll meet with Lucy Fowler Williams, Associate Curator, American Collections; Laura Hortz Stanton, Director of Collections; and Stacey O. Espenlaub, the Museum’s Kamensky NAGPRA Coordinator to discuss their “human remains policy, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, repatriation, and the complexities and challenges [the Museum] faces in addressing these issues on an institutional level.”
To Do Before Today’s Class:
- If you have time, please tour the Native American Voices Gallery at the Penn Museum on your own.
- Watch Goodman and Samuel Redman, “Bone Rooms: How Elite Schools and Museums Amassed Black and Native Human Remains Without Consent,” Democracy Now! (April 30, 2021) [13:57].
- Dedeepya Guthikonda, “Penn Museum to No Longer Openly Display Human Remains Amid Years of Activist Demands,” The Daily Pennsylvanian (October 1, 2023) [newly published / optional: Caleb Crain: “Inside the Penn Museum’s Efforts to Respect Native American Origins of Artifacts,” 34th Street (April 8, 2024)]. Â
- Allison Meier has prepared a helpful annotated bibliography on literature examining the history, politics, and ethics of human remains in museums. Read “Human Remains and Museums: A Reading List,” JStor Daily (December 28, 2023).
Supplemental Resources: Collecting Earth
- James Andrew Billingsley, “An Arboreum at the End of an Epoch,” The Avery Review 46 (2020).
- Shannon Mattern, “Archival Phase Shifts,” Anthropocene Curriculum (2021).
- Shannon Matern, “Tree Thinking,” Places Journal (September 2021).
- Jon Bowermaster, Chris Rahm, Devin Pickering, “Seeds of Hope” (Oceans 8, 2018).
- D. Graham Burnett, “The Archive of Ice,” Cabinet 59 (Fall 2015).
- “The Doomsday Vault,” VPRO (2013) .
- Yuriko Furuhata, “Archipelagic Archives: Media Geology and the Deep Times of Japan’s Settler Colonialism,” Public Culture 33:3 (2021).
- “Glacier Ice Samples Act as Records of Climate Change’s Impact on Earth,” PBS News Hour (November 4, 2021) .
- “Inside Earth’s Doomsday Seed Vault,” VICE Impact (November 2020) .
- Jumana Manna, “Wild Relatives” (2018) .
- Antonio Regalado, “The DNA Data Storage Machine that’s the Size of a School Bus,” MIT Technology Review (October 2, 2018). See also the work of Mél Hogan.
- Sophia Roosth, “Latent Life,’ Anthropocene Curriculum (HKW, 2018) .
- Sophia Roosth, “Virus, Coal, and Seed: Subcutaneous Life in the Polar North,” Los Angeles Review of Books (December 21, 2016).
Supplemental Resources: Collecting Bodies
- Avery M. Johnson, “What Is a Museum? A Memo to the Penn Community on the Penn Museum,” Philamonuments (2021).
- Penn Museum, Human Remains Policy.
- Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Harvard University Press, 2016).
- Stephani Syjuco, “Overlays” (2021); “Block Out the Sun” (video, 2021); “Block Out the Sun” (2019).