[MSN] CONTESTED CULTURAL HERITAGE IN A GLOBAL WORLD

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

CONTESTED CULTURAL HERITAGE IN A GLOBAL WORLD

Thursday and Friday, April 24-25, 2008
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Program

Spurlock Museum and the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum
Practices (CHAMP) have 
organized a major conference on "Contested Cultural Heritage" to be held at
the Museum on Friday, 
April 25, 2008.

Dr. Donny George Youkhanna, former Director of the Iraq National Museum and
now Visiting Professor 
at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, will deliver the keynote
address of the 
conference ("Mayhem in Mesopotamia" on April 24).

The conference brings together an international group of scholars to discuss
how forces of 
religion and nationalism may act to heighten inter-group tension around
heritage claims, even to 
the point of causing the destruction of ancient and historic sites. Among
the cases to be 
considered are the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan;
Christian and Muslim 
conflict resolution at a major mosque in Cordoba, Spain; different views and
practices toward the 
indigenous past among Native Americans and the archaeologists who study
their ancestors; the 
Parthenon/Elgin Marbles debate; Egypt's demand for the return of the Bust of
Nefertiti; heritage 
frictions implicated in the recent Balkans War; Peru's attempt to repatriate
the Machu Picchu 
collections from Yale University; and the aggressive marking of Protestant
and Catholic identities 
in Belfast, Northern Ireland through wall art. A roundtable discussion at
the end of the 
conference seeks to chart new directions for implementing policies that
lessen the negative 
dimensions of cultural heritage and further awareness of its value for a
larger public, thereby 
promoting site preservation as well as social/political harmony.

Registration for this conference is required. The cost is $15 and includes a
box lunch on the day 
of the conference, April 25, 2008.
Please fill out the form indicating lunch choice and send the form and your
check (made out to 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
to:

CHAMP
Department of Landscape Architecture
101 Temple Hoyne Buell Hall
611 Taft Drive
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL 61820

The deadline for registration is February 15, 2008.