With Sarah Graff. “From Poetry to Pedagogy: Platforming Exilic Voices in the Museum.” Book chapter, Teaching About the Ancient World in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice, edited by Jen Thum, Carl Walsh, and Lisa Haney, Routledge, forthcoming.
A crucial tool for pedagogy within museum contexts, particularly in relation to ancient artifacts and cultures, is an emphasis on the movement and migration of peoples and objects throughout the arc of human history. The displacement of museum objects across time and space adds to their value to the institutions and nations that house them, but the same attitude is not extended towards migrants, refugees, and diaspora communities who share with those objects not only a place of origin, but a story of exile and a journey across the world under the exigencies of war, colonialism, and precarity (Sergi 2021). This emphasis on movement (and the cultural hybridity it engenders) is not new to critical museology: “objects as migrants” has been advanced by Arjun Appadurai (2017) in direct relation to the story of refugees in Germany, and as a step towards the “post-ethnological” museum (Clifford 2016). Stefan Weber of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s Museum für Islamische Kunst has long deployed such an outlook to combat the othering of Islam and Muslims in Europe, as with his “Kulturgeschichten” project for German educators and “Objects of Transfer” and Multaka projects for the galleries (2018). Nevertheless, providing migrants themselves with a platform from which to tell their stories of movement in relation to ancient artifacts in exile is far more rare. Such a doubled move can serve as an inclusive pedagogical tool for the public, restoring their experience of ancient artifacts to one grounded in networks of human relation, rather than the more common framing in which these objects are universalized as “world heritage” (Scott 2012). The two primary case-studies this chapter contends with are: (1) the ongoing collaboration (which began in 2019) between the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near East and the Narratio Fellowship program, and (2) the “GATE: Between Babylon and Berlin” community event (2023), organized by Aya Labanieh and Dr. Sophus Helle at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany.