Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Associate Professor and Executive Director, Kansas State University
Proposal Type: Structured Conversation
Seeking: Additional Presenters, General Feedback and Interest
Abstract: This presentation is an illustrated narrative of an active collaboration between professional historians (curators) with the municipally owned Flint Hills Discovery Center. This is an opportunity for both highlighting a project and soliciting feedback from audience members in anticipation of the exhibit opening in September 2016.
Seeking: This year’s theme of “Challenging an exclusive past” is deeply embedded in the mission of the Chapman Center for Rural Studies at Kansas State and is the heart of an upcoming exhibit to rediscover, recover and celebrate the lives of rural peoples. An undergraduate research lab in the Digital Humanities, the Chapman Center for Rural Studies (CCRS) mines local and regional sources for the stories of the optimistic men and women who created places they believed would survive and are now in danger of being lost to memory forever. These stories of rural places are published by the CCCRS on an Omeka based platform that generates extended collaboration with the Public. As rural places continue to depopulate at an alarming rate, the LOST exhibit will offer crucial opportunities for historians and humanities scholars (and the undergraduate researchers) to make their projects and practices accessible to new audiences and build an ever more inclusive public history landscape.
A walk-through of the proposal for a professional exhibit (opening September 16, 2016) will reveal the challenges and opportunities fostered by open collaboration between the professional historians who serve as exhibit curators and the staff of the municipally owned Flint Hills Discovery Center, an award winning educational center dedicated to the ecology and history of the Flint Hills region of Kansas. Central to this planning process has been the concept of visitor participation in the form of a story-corps inspired (and NPR sponsored) story box that will continue to travel the region well after the close of the exhibit in 2017.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to share contact information for other people the proposer should reach out to, please get in contact directly: Bonnie Lynn-Sherow,blynn[at]ksu.edu
If you have general ideas or feedback to share please feel free to use the comments feature below.
All feedback, and offers of assistance, should be submitted by July 3, 2015.
Related Topics: Museums/Exhibits, Oral History