It is with great pleasure that we invite you to attend the second seminar in the Wits City Institute’s Seminar Series for 2017, on Friday 24 March 2017 ,13h00-14h00 at the Wits Anthropology Museum, Robert Sobukwe Block, Wits University Main Campus , Braamfontein. 

How can museums and exhibitions reproduce, challenge or help transform popular histories, understandings of the role of ethnoracial formations in those histories, and other rhetorics of value? This presentation addresses these questions by examining how exhibit design has helped shape transformations in South African museums and how it shapes visitor experience at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. It will consider exhibition content, a range of design resources and techniques, and the particular historical moments that have brought these questions to the fore in both places.

Corinne Kratz is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies Emerita at Emory University and Emory Director for the African Critical Inquiry Program. She writes on culture and communication; the histories and politics of visual and verbal representation, particularly in museums, exhibitions, and photography; and performance and ritual. Kratz’s books include Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation, The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition (which received both the Collier Prize and honorable mention for the Rubin Outstanding Publication Award), and the co-edited volume Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. She has also published numerous articles and curated museum exhibitions. Kratz has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, and others. She is currently on the Council for Museum Anthropology Board and research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art.

For queries and to RSVP contact:  info.cityinstitute@wits.ac.za