The Beautiful, the Useful, the Boring and the Strange - Encountering Things in the Museum

This lecture is given by Sandra H. Dudley, Professor of Museum Anthropology and Head of the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. The lecture is part of the lecture series ‘Das Zeug’.  

Dudley had an early background in aesthetics, prior to training as a social and material anthropologist at the University of Oxford – where she also worked in a number of curatorial capacities at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Her displacement approach (Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond: Loss, Liminality and Hopeful Encounters, 2021) emerged from her long-term research in ethnic minority refugee camps in SE Asia, in heritage settings in India and the UK, and with museums in Myanmar. 

Dudley’s work looks afresh at the lives and effects of things, reframing them as a series of displacements and attempting to see as if from objects’ points of view. It offers a new way of approaching the movements and interactions between the components of the material world, looking closely at the frontiers, hesitations, surprises and transformations that happen along the way.