Zoom conference link: https://zoom.us/j/91255064760?pwd=TlRpeXZPaWVMbGx3Q2tTSi9SU2dZUT09

Cintia Velázquez Marroni (Instituto Mora, Mexico City):

“From Natural History to Environmental History: Displacements in Mexican Museums and the Heritage Sector.”

Abstract:

A look at Mexican museums and other “heritage apparatuses” in the last 200 years will show a series of spatial, conceptual, material and institutional displacements as regards their understanding of and relationship with the environment. These understandings range from the early visions derived from natural history to the more contemporary approaches, which, as I argue, can be placed under the interdisciplinary umbrella term of environmental humanities. Through an object-based approach of five case studies in Mexico City (including some located in museums and some others outside of them), the presentation will discuss issues of human/non-human relationships, conservation, value, historical change, identity and loss, all of which are daily features of life in times of planetary collapse. In analyzing these local cases, I will show the connections and disconnections that they hold with the national, regional and global scales, thus potentially opening new strands for action and thinking.

Short Bio:

Full time lecturer and researcher at Mora Institute (Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora). She is Doctor in Museum Studies by the University of Leicester, UK, Master in Museology by the National School of Conservation, Restoration and Museography (ENCRyM-INAH), and Bachelor of History by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In both 2011 and 2016 she won the Miguel Covarrubias National Prize awarded by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). As a museum practitioner, she performed in outreach, learning and curatorial roles at the Tlatelolco University Cultural Centre (UNAM) and as freelance for exhibition design firms. Cintia was Editor-in-Chief of Museological Review (School of Museum Studies, Leicester) and of Intervención. International Journal of Conservation, Restoration and Museology (ENCRYM-INAH). She was principal researcher of the biannual project “Objects of dialogue: collections, contemporary issues and organizational change in Mexican museums'' which was awarded a major grant by Mexico's Research Council (Conahcyt). She has published in Museum Management and Curatorship, Latin American and LatinX Visual Culture and The Public Historian, as well as in Routledge readers on Heritage, Museum Studies, and Environmental History. Cintia’s main academic interests lie at the intersection of environmental humanities, critical heritage studies and museology, including (but not limited to): institutional histories of museums and the heritage sector; cultural infrastructure and heritage in the city; curatorship and material culture; natural/cultural heritage entanglements; as well as post-humanism and multispecies thinking. She can (still!) be found on X with the handle: @civema.

Poster