Meeting Places: Encountering the relational praxis of museum practitioners at Fort Edmonton Park
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This doctoral dissertation examines how Indigenous and non-Indigenous museum practitioners consider relationality in their practices. Employing a theoretical framework of historical materialist dialectics and working with collaborative ethnography, my research participants and I explore Treaty obligations and the Cree wisdom concept of wâhkôhtowin to contest the colonial history of museums through a relational lens and propose a means by which our existing practices can be transformed. My research takes up critical and new museological scholarship, critical adult education theory, and Indigenization projects within museums. My dissertation research, guided by questions of how relational obligations transform the praxis of museum practitioners, begins with three primary acknowledgements: (1) museums are pedagogical sites, (2) since the late 1980s, museum practitioners have been called upon to make deep foundational changes to their practices that address and alter imperial, colonial, and racist (among others) practices in the museum, and (3) these disruptions are, in this historical moment, manifested in substantial ways that challenge the purpose of museums and call into the question the role of the museum practitioner. This unsettling of museums can be seen in a multiplicity of changes to practitioner workplace practices resulting in innovative curatorial and exhibit design directions which address the legacies mentioned above; increased, renewed, and reframed partnerships with community; and new attention to the ethical funding sources. Germane to this research is the practitioner’s renewed understanding of relationships and relational obligations and how a commitment to relationality offers a potential to make these profound foundational changes. In particular, my research considers human-to-human relations, human-to-more-than-human relations, and relations that have been laid out through the spirit and intent of Treaty 6 (beyond the legal document), all of which are manifested between museum practitioners, between practitioners and the institution, between practitioners and the public, and between practitioners and the land upon which we work. Exploring a relational museological praxis offers me new ways to think about existing social and material relationships in museums, as well as ways to reconceptualize those relationships and, subsequently, museological practices.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".