In Episode 2 of Resurgence: Culture Collective, ANU Research Fellow Jilda Andrews talks about the project she initiated in response to her experience as a First Nations’ museum professional and academic—and why it didn’t work.

The project sought to establish a support network of colleague’s working in collecting institutions, to address issues of cultural safety resulting from their role as mediators between institutional cultures, collections, and communities. But the invitation to look ‘beyond reconciliation’ called for something different—a renewed intent and in purposeful dialogue with Country. In this episode Jilda goes on to explore the provocation offered by the framework of Beyond Reconciliation to reflect on and re-think practice in a forward or future-focussed way.

For more on Jilda’s thinking about the future of museums, see ‘Dr. Jilda Andrews is reimagining the future of museums’, by Luis Perz, originally published in the ANU Reporter 24 May 2024:

https://chms.cass.anu.edu.au/news/dr-jilda-andrews-reimagining-future-museums

See also her article: ‘Cool burning the collection: Museum research as a regenerative act’, Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 35, Issue 1–2, April 2024.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/taja.12499

This podcast series was developed from work done through the Beyond Reconciliation project in the School of History at ANU, as part of the Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Grand Challenge (2021–2024). This was one of five ‘Grand Challenges’ mounted by the ANU with the aim to invest in transformative research to impact on the world’s most intractable problems.

The Beyond Reconciliation project was a response to the demand for a thorough-going process of truth-telling about Australia’s past. The central idea of the project was to support capacity building to pursue history-making and truth-telling in local Indigenous communities. The challenge was to work in different ways with different communities to model pathways to ‘telling the true stories they want to tell in the ways they want to tell them’.

For more information on the Beyond Reconciliation project see:

https://history.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/acih/highlights/beyond-reconciliation-grand-challenge

The podcast series Resurgence: talking about First Nations’ Community-led Historical Practice was produced by Robyn McKenzie, for the Australian Centre for Indigenous History (ACIH) in the School of History at the Australian National University. Sound editing and composition by Emma Hoy of Signal Creative. This Podcast series has been supported by funding from the Australian National University’s Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Grand Challenge.

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