Isabella: Photographs from the African Collections

On Wednesday, my day was divided between attending the lecture on public programs in the morning and going through the photograph boxes from the African Section in the afternoon. The lecture on public programming was really interesting because it was focused on how to best engage young students with the museum. Growing up, I loved attending interactive museum events and it's really interesting to hear about the Penn Museum's programs and imagine what I would have thought about them as a child. One interesting part from the lecture was the idea that for children with disabilities, the programs aim to give them skills that they carry with them into future careers (such as emotion recognition) rather than content-based information. The focus is to give these children in particular skills that will help them become "productive citizens who can hold a job" later on. I understand the sentiment, but the whole idea sounds capitalistic (let me mold you into the ideal worker) and a little condescending. All children should receive content-based information and take-away skills. How you  may best present the information can differ depending on differing abilities, but I think prioritizing content for some groups and not for others seems unhelpful and even dangerous.

After the lecture, I enjoyed going through the boxes of photographs from the African section, scanning/uploading the photographs that would be most useful for the future exhibition, and organizing the photographs in the deliverable file. I found many interesting ones, such as one white man standing next to an African man in a picture labelled, "Waiting for the delivery of African materials for J.F.G Umlauff." I also found ethnographic photographs from Alfred M. Collins' expedition to the Benin Congo, pictures of the burned tusk when it was a part of an altar in Benin, and photographs and inscriptions from Carleton S. Coon's expeditions. I believe that these will be useful for the object research and I will continue sorting through the boxes during the final days. 

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