An article on the Ohio State Newark Website
NEWARK, Ohio, November 15, 2016 – The new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. is more than a place to pass on knowledge from the past, according to The Ohio State University at Newark Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Weiser, Ph.D. She believes it changes the story we tell about the vital role African Americans have played and will continue to play in our national story as we move forward. Weiser conducts research on museum studies, public spaces and identification/national identity.
“The role of African Americans in our nation’s history could be told in so many ways. So the particular choices the museum makes regarding what is included, what is left out, how and who tells what — these come out of our communal understanding of the American story, but they will also have an impact upon the understanding of that story in the future,” said Weiser.
Weiser recently presented at the 9th International Conference on the Inclusive Museum held in Cincinnati at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. The conference is in a different country each year and includes people from around the world. It engages participants in panel and poster presentations, roundtables, workshops and museum tours, all with the aim of sharing how to open up museums to communities.
“I presented on the ways that memorial museums around the world give a voice to the historical victims of whatever oppression they were set up to address, while they also may work for necessary reconciliation with the perpetrators, and they certainly encourage present-day visitors to act in the present to prevent the oppression from recurring,” said Weiser. “These museums have to walk a very careful line between telling the truth and promoting national or international reconciliation, and between making visitors empathize with the past trauma while they also accept their responsibility for action in the present. I combined ideas from rhetoric and psychology to document what was happening in museums I’ve visited from Rwanda to Uzbekistan to the Czech Republic and offered a way to think about how to present any kind of difficult, community-rupturing situation.”
Weiser said she enjoys these conferences because the focus is on how museums can be partners with the community, agents of social change and places where diverse people can come, find themselves represented and have a voice in dialogues over issues of communal identity.
“Whenever I attend conferences, I always feel inspired to take more seriously the impact of my scholarship in the world, as well as being exposed to great ideas for how this might happen in our community here in central Ohio,” said Weiser. “For instance, Newark’s history is largely depicted as an industrial history, which both comes out of our historical understanding of ourselves and shapes that understanding in the present of what we can be. We’re an industrial town, not an education town or an agriculture town or an artsy town, even though we have education, agricultural and arts sectors. So how do we tell the other stories: of our non-industrial identity, our diversity, our indigenous past? How are we all facing the ups and downs of our present as an industrial-plus town? How do the stories we tell enable us to envision the future together?”
“These are the same issues that the African American museum addresses,” she notes. “It’s not just a depiction of what happened in the past, it’s a statement about who we are in the present—and including diverse voices changes the ‘we’ of that statement. This changing sense of self-identity, in turn, changes our vision for what the future might look like.”
Weiser recently finished a book that will be coming out next year, entitled Museum World: Rhetorical Identities in National Spaces. “I’m fascinated by the ways that diverse groups of people imagine themselves to be part of one society,” she said, “because ‘who we are’ is always the first step in a discussion over ‘what we should do.’” To research the book, she visited national museums in 22 countries on six continents and spent a semester working with museum studies scholars in Europe.
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