Erica Lehrer | Concordia University (Canada) (original) (raw)
Books by Erica Lehrer
This book […] is the result of a scholarly intervention into the space of the Kraków Ethnographic... more This book […] is the result of a scholarly intervention into the space of the Kraków Ethnographic Museum. While reflecting on one specific project, it opens many questions relevant for reformulating our ideas about both the museum and the academy. The project’s approach to intellectual deliberation is horizontal, engaging students on equal footing with professors, resulting in a publication that embodies collaborative practice. It is also a unique example of how thought can be manifested in creative action, which itself then produces a new object for critical reflection. It is a true blend of theory and practice; an attempt to embed the university in the broader social world while similarly urging museums to speak directly to the societies about which they teach. The project thus proposes both a new form of research and a new take on the presentation of academic knowledge. Thinking through the museum becomes – as promised – not only a critical view of the
institution, but also a meditation on society, its rules, and the identities of its inhabitants. -- Iwona Kurz, University of Warsaw (fragment of review)
Widok zza bliska. Inne obrazy Zagłady., 2023
"Wprowadzając nowe wizualne kategorie opisu, oparte na oryginalnych badaniach terenowych, autorzy... more "Wprowadzając nowe wizualne kategorie opisu, oparte na oryginalnych badaniach terenowych, autorzy książki [...] na powrót otwierają rozmowę o tym, jak polska wieś zapamiętała Zagładę oraz co z niej zrozumiała. [...] Fotografie Wilczyka, od początku towarzyszące badaniom zespołu, stanowią rodzaj odkrywczego przekładu wniosków badawczych na język wizualny. Tom składający się z się z 16 nowatorskich, momentami bardzo kontrowersyjnych szkiców uważam za niezwykle ważne wydarzenie w polskim dyskursie ludoznawczym. Debata, którą z pewnością wywołają, jest polskiej humanistyce bardzo potrzebna, tym bardziej w erze populizmów." JOANNA TOKARSKA-BAKIR (fragment recenzji)
https://wydawnictwo.krytykapolityczna.pl/widok-zza-bliska-inne-obrazy-zaglady-1169
Różnicowanie narodowego „my”: Kuratorskie marzenia, 2019
Książka pod redakcją Eriki Lehrer i Romy Sendyki jest efektem akademickiej interwencji w przestrz... more Książka pod redakcją Eriki Lehrer i Romy Sendyki jest efektem akademickiej interwencji w przestrzeń Muzeum Etnograficznego w Krakowie (MEK). Opisuje pojedynczy projekt, który jednak kryje w sobie wiele wymiarów istotnych dla przeformułowania nie tylko idei muzeum, ale też akademii. Refleksja akademicka ma tu charakter "poziomy", angażujący studentki na równi z wykładowczyniami, co znajduje swoje odzwierciedlenie również w publikacji-to rzeczywiście działanie kolektywne. Jednocześnie projekt jest wzorcowym przykładem na to, jak z myślenia wynika działanie, które następnie znów pod-dawane jest refleksji. W efekcie dokonuje się rzeczywiste połączenie teorii z praktyką oraz włączenie uniwersytetu w tkankę społeczną w tej mierze, w jakiej muzea mówią o społeczeństwach, do których są adresowane. W perspektywie akademickiej z kolei projekt proponuje nową formę badania oraz przedstawiania wiedzy akademickiej. Myślenie muzeum staje się tutaj, zgodnie z zapowiedzią, nie tylko refleksją o instytucji i jej krytycznym oglądem, ale myśleniem o otaczającym świecie i prawach oraz tożsamościach jego mieszkanek i mieszkańców.
-- Iwona Kurz, Uniwersytet Warszawski
Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions Edited by Shelley Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer ... more Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions
Edited by Shelley Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer
Scholars are challenged to create their own exhibitions.
(Museum studies ∙ anthropology)
What if museum critics were challenged to envision their own exhibitions? In Curatorial Dreams, fourteen authors from disciplines throughout the social sciences and humanities propose exhibitions inspired by their research and critical concerns to creatively put theory into practice.
Pushing the boundaries of museology, this collection gives rare insight into the process of conceptualizing exhibitions. The contributors offer concrete, innovative projects, each designed for a specific setting in which to translate critical academic theory about society, culture, and history into accessible imagined exhibitions. Spanning
Australia, Barbados, Canada, Chile, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States, the exhibitions are staged in museums, scientific institutions, art galleries, and everyday sites. Essays explore political and practical constraints, imaginative freedom, and experiment with critical, participatory, and socially relevant exhibition design.
While the deconstructive critique of museums remains relevant, Curatorial Dreams charts new ground, proposing unique modes of engagement that enrich public scholarship and dialogue.
Shelley Ruth Butler is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
Erica Lehrer is Canada Research Chair in Museum and Heritage Studies at Concordia University.
April 2016
978-0-7735-4683-7 $39.95 paper
978-0-7735-4682-0 $110.00 cloth
6 x 9 400pp 30 photos
Ebook available
Much of the literature on post-violent contexts addresses problems of transitional justice, memor... more Much of the literature on post-violent contexts addresses problems of transitional justice, memory studies, and post-conflict reconciliation. This volume inscribes an innovative domain of inquiry, situating itself creatively amidst these discussions but building upon the literatures of museum and heritage studies. The contributors (themselves practitioners, artists, curators, activists and academics) draw from a broad range of geographical and theoretical material, and explore new ways of bearing witness vis-a-vis curatorial practice, heritage work and memorializing the past, to examine the challenges and limitations of such endeavors.
Authors:
ERICA LEHRER is Assistant Professor in History and Anthropology-Sociology at Concordia University in Montreal, where she also holds the Canada Research chair in Post-Conflict Studies. She is author of Revisiting Jewish Poland: Heritage, Memory, Reconciliation (2012), and has undertaken experimental curatorial work on Jewish heritage and memory in contemporary Poland.
CYNTHIA E. MILTON is Canada Research Chair in Latin American History and Associate Professor in the Département d'histoire at the Université de Montréal, Canada. She is author of The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (2007), editor of The Arts of Truth-telling in Post-Shining Path Peru, and co-editor of The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005).
MONICA EILEEN PATTERSON is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of numerous publications, and co-editor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (2011).
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Witnesses to Witnessing; E.Lehrer & C.E.Milton
PART I: BEARING WITNESS BETWEEN MUSEUMS AND COMMUNITIES
'We were so far away': Exhibiting Inuit Oral Histories of Residential Schools; H.Igloliorte
The Past is a Dangerous Place: the Museum as a Safe Haven; V.Szekeres
Teaching Tolerance through Objects of Hatred: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia as 'Counter-Museum'; M.E.Patterson
Politics of the Past: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide at the Kigali Memorial Center; A.Sodaro
PART II: VISUALIZING THE PAST
Living Historically through Photographs in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reflections on Kliptown Museum, Soweto; D.Newbury
Showing and Telling: Photography Exhibitions in Israeli Discourses of Dissent; T.Katriel
Visualizing Apartheid: Re-framing Truth and Reconciliation through Contemporary South African Art; E.Mosely
PART III: MATERIALITY AND MEMORIAL CHALLENGES
Points of No Return: Cultural Heritage and Counter-Memory in Post-Yugoslavia; A.Herscher
Defacing Memory: (Un)tying Peru's Memory Knots; C.E.Milton
(Mis)representations of the Jewish Past in Poland's Memoryscapes: Nationalism, Religion and Political Economies of Commemoration; S.Kapralski
Afterward: The Turn to Pedagogy: a Needed Conversation on the Practice of Curating Difficult Knowledge; R.I.Simon
Index
Copyright © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited
Review:
'How to put difficult knowledge on public display is one of the biggest challenges for curators. It is also of major importance in contemporary civic life: what should be said and shown in museums, and how? This raises fascinating and complex intellectual and political questions. This book exposes and tackles these brilliantly through excellent discussion of a wide range of provocative cases. It should be read by anybody concerned with the dilemmas of curating difficult knowledge.' - Sharon Macdonald, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK
Papers by Erica Lehrer
Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, 2023
Jewish Quarterly Review, 2022
Diskursbuch Sprachlosigkeit, 2021
Across Anthropology: Convergences through Museums, Colonial Legacies, and the Curatorial. , 2020
In (Eds.) Jonas Tinius and Margareta von Oswald, (Leuven University Press), 2020: pp. 283-316.
Museum Worlds
Throughout human history, the spread of disease has closed borders, restricted civic movement, an... more Throughout human history, the spread of disease has closed borders, restricted civic movement, and fueled fear of the unknown; yet at the same time, it has helped build cultural resilience. On 11 March 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) classified COVID-19 as a pandemic. The novel zoonotic disease, first reported to the WHO in December 2019, was no longer restricted to Wuhan or to China, as the highly contagious coronavirus had spread to more than 60 countries. The public health message to citizens everywhere was to save lives by staying home; the economic fallout stemming from this sudden rupture of services and the impact on people’s well-being was mindboggling. Around the globe museums, galleries, and popular world heritage sites closed (Associated Press 2020). The Smithsonian Magazine reported that all 19 institutes, including the National Zoo and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), would be closed to the public on 14 March (Daher 2020). On the same day, New...
Museum Worlds, 2019
Looking beyond Poland's internationally lauded new Jewish museums, this article asks how Jews are... more Looking beyond Poland's internationally lauded new Jewish museums, this article asks how Jews are represented in longer-standing folk and ethnographic museums whose mandates have been to represent the historical culture of the Polish nation. How have such museums navigated growing internal pressures to incorporate Jews and reconsider the boundaries of "Polishness" alongside external pressures to rethink the function and approach of ethnographic museology? Based on three museums that have taken three different approaches to Jewishness-what we call cabinet of Jewish curiosities, two solitudes, and ambivalent externalization-we assess the roles played by inherited discourses and structures as well as human agents within and beyond the museum. We illuminate how social debate about the character of the nation (and Jews' place in it) plays out in museums at a moment in their transition from nineteenth-to twenty-first-century paradigms and how a distinctively Polish path toward a "new museology" is emerging in conversation with and resistance to its Western counterparts.
KEYWORDS: critical curating, ethnographic exhibitions, heritage, Jews, multiculturalism, Poland
Holocaust Studies, 2019
Based on preliminary research, we ask what insights can be gleaned about Polish Holocaust memory ... more Based on preliminary research, we ask what insights can be gleaned about Polish Holocaust memory and testimony by examining the prolific art made by Polish ‘folk’ artists, via a range of disciplinary approaches. What can art history, visual culture studies, oral history, anthropology, memory studies, and museum studies tell us about the motivations, functions, and ethical implications of such works? Can they be considered acts of witness? Broadly, our text considers the status of ‘art naïve’ in the contexts of Holocaust representation, ethnographic museology, and bystander testimony.
Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage: Ethnographies of TRACES, 2019
This book presents innovative ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between art, anthrop... more This book presents innovative ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between art, anthropology, and contested cultural heritage, drawing on research from the interdisciplinary TRACES project (funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 program). The case studies in this volume critically assess how and in which arrangements artistic/aesthetic methods and creative everyday practices contribute to strengthening communities both culturally and economically. They also explore the extent to which these methods emphasize minority voices and ultimately set in motion a process of reflexive Europeanisation from below which unfolds within Europe and beyond its borders.
At the heart of the book is the development of a new way of transmitting contentious cultural heritage, which responds to the present situation in Europe of unstable political conditions and a sense of Europe in crisis. With chapters looking at difficult art exhibitions on colonialism, death masks, Holocaust memorials, and skull collections, the contributors articulate a response to the crisis in current economic-political conditions in Europe and advances brand new theoretical groundwork on the configuration of a renewed European identity.
http://www.traces.polimi.it/2018/07/26/from-heritage-communities-to-communities-of-implication/
Polish translation of "Public Pedagogy and Transnational, Transcultural Museums." Poland and Poli... more Polish translation of "Public Pedagogy and Transnational, Transcultural Museums." Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies. (Eds.) Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Iwa Nawrocki. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2018. Pgs. 197-218.
Laboratorium muzeum. Tożsamość. 2016. Pages 68-94.
In: Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies. (Eds.) Irena Grudzinska-Gross... more In: Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies. (Eds.) Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Iwa Nawrocki. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2016. Pgs. 197-218.
This book […] is the result of a scholarly intervention into the space of the Kraków Ethnographic... more This book […] is the result of a scholarly intervention into the space of the Kraków Ethnographic Museum. While reflecting on one specific project, it opens many questions relevant for reformulating our ideas about both the museum and the academy. The project’s approach to intellectual deliberation is horizontal, engaging students on equal footing with professors, resulting in a publication that embodies collaborative practice. It is also a unique example of how thought can be manifested in creative action, which itself then produces a new object for critical reflection. It is a true blend of theory and practice; an attempt to embed the university in the broader social world while similarly urging museums to speak directly to the societies about which they teach. The project thus proposes both a new form of research and a new take on the presentation of academic knowledge. Thinking through the museum becomes – as promised – not only a critical view of the
institution, but also a meditation on society, its rules, and the identities of its inhabitants. -- Iwona Kurz, University of Warsaw (fragment of review)
Widok zza bliska. Inne obrazy Zagłady., 2023
"Wprowadzając nowe wizualne kategorie opisu, oparte na oryginalnych badaniach terenowych, autorzy... more "Wprowadzając nowe wizualne kategorie opisu, oparte na oryginalnych badaniach terenowych, autorzy książki [...] na powrót otwierają rozmowę o tym, jak polska wieś zapamiętała Zagładę oraz co z niej zrozumiała. [...] Fotografie Wilczyka, od początku towarzyszące badaniom zespołu, stanowią rodzaj odkrywczego przekładu wniosków badawczych na język wizualny. Tom składający się z się z 16 nowatorskich, momentami bardzo kontrowersyjnych szkiców uważam za niezwykle ważne wydarzenie w polskim dyskursie ludoznawczym. Debata, którą z pewnością wywołają, jest polskiej humanistyce bardzo potrzebna, tym bardziej w erze populizmów." JOANNA TOKARSKA-BAKIR (fragment recenzji)
https://wydawnictwo.krytykapolityczna.pl/widok-zza-bliska-inne-obrazy-zaglady-1169
Różnicowanie narodowego „my”: Kuratorskie marzenia, 2019
Książka pod redakcją Eriki Lehrer i Romy Sendyki jest efektem akademickiej interwencji w przestrz... more Książka pod redakcją Eriki Lehrer i Romy Sendyki jest efektem akademickiej interwencji w przestrzeń Muzeum Etnograficznego w Krakowie (MEK). Opisuje pojedynczy projekt, który jednak kryje w sobie wiele wymiarów istotnych dla przeformułowania nie tylko idei muzeum, ale też akademii. Refleksja akademicka ma tu charakter "poziomy", angażujący studentki na równi z wykładowczyniami, co znajduje swoje odzwierciedlenie również w publikacji-to rzeczywiście działanie kolektywne. Jednocześnie projekt jest wzorcowym przykładem na to, jak z myślenia wynika działanie, które następnie znów pod-dawane jest refleksji. W efekcie dokonuje się rzeczywiste połączenie teorii z praktyką oraz włączenie uniwersytetu w tkankę społeczną w tej mierze, w jakiej muzea mówią o społeczeństwach, do których są adresowane. W perspektywie akademickiej z kolei projekt proponuje nową formę badania oraz przedstawiania wiedzy akademickiej. Myślenie muzeum staje się tutaj, zgodnie z zapowiedzią, nie tylko refleksją o instytucji i jej krytycznym oglądem, ale myśleniem o otaczającym świecie i prawach oraz tożsamościach jego mieszkanek i mieszkańców.
-- Iwona Kurz, Uniwersytet Warszawski
Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions Edited by Shelley Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer ... more Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions
Edited by Shelley Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer
Scholars are challenged to create their own exhibitions.
(Museum studies ∙ anthropology)
What if museum critics were challenged to envision their own exhibitions? In Curatorial Dreams, fourteen authors from disciplines throughout the social sciences and humanities propose exhibitions inspired by their research and critical concerns to creatively put theory into practice.
Pushing the boundaries of museology, this collection gives rare insight into the process of conceptualizing exhibitions. The contributors offer concrete, innovative projects, each designed for a specific setting in which to translate critical academic theory about society, culture, and history into accessible imagined exhibitions. Spanning
Australia, Barbados, Canada, Chile, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States, the exhibitions are staged in museums, scientific institutions, art galleries, and everyday sites. Essays explore political and practical constraints, imaginative freedom, and experiment with critical, participatory, and socially relevant exhibition design.
While the deconstructive critique of museums remains relevant, Curatorial Dreams charts new ground, proposing unique modes of engagement that enrich public scholarship and dialogue.
Shelley Ruth Butler is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
Erica Lehrer is Canada Research Chair in Museum and Heritage Studies at Concordia University.
April 2016
978-0-7735-4683-7 $39.95 paper
978-0-7735-4682-0 $110.00 cloth
6 x 9 400pp 30 photos
Ebook available
Much of the literature on post-violent contexts addresses problems of transitional justice, memor... more Much of the literature on post-violent contexts addresses problems of transitional justice, memory studies, and post-conflict reconciliation. This volume inscribes an innovative domain of inquiry, situating itself creatively amidst these discussions but building upon the literatures of museum and heritage studies. The contributors (themselves practitioners, artists, curators, activists and academics) draw from a broad range of geographical and theoretical material, and explore new ways of bearing witness vis-a-vis curatorial practice, heritage work and memorializing the past, to examine the challenges and limitations of such endeavors.
Authors:
ERICA LEHRER is Assistant Professor in History and Anthropology-Sociology at Concordia University in Montreal, where she also holds the Canada Research chair in Post-Conflict Studies. She is author of Revisiting Jewish Poland: Heritage, Memory, Reconciliation (2012), and has undertaken experimental curatorial work on Jewish heritage and memory in contemporary Poland.
CYNTHIA E. MILTON is Canada Research Chair in Latin American History and Associate Professor in the Département d'histoire at the Université de Montréal, Canada. She is author of The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (2007), editor of The Arts of Truth-telling in Post-Shining Path Peru, and co-editor of The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005).
MONICA EILEEN PATTERSON is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of numerous publications, and co-editor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (2011).
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Witnesses to Witnessing; E.Lehrer & C.E.Milton
PART I: BEARING WITNESS BETWEEN MUSEUMS AND COMMUNITIES
'We were so far away': Exhibiting Inuit Oral Histories of Residential Schools; H.Igloliorte
The Past is a Dangerous Place: the Museum as a Safe Haven; V.Szekeres
Teaching Tolerance through Objects of Hatred: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia as 'Counter-Museum'; M.E.Patterson
Politics of the Past: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide at the Kigali Memorial Center; A.Sodaro
PART II: VISUALIZING THE PAST
Living Historically through Photographs in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reflections on Kliptown Museum, Soweto; D.Newbury
Showing and Telling: Photography Exhibitions in Israeli Discourses of Dissent; T.Katriel
Visualizing Apartheid: Re-framing Truth and Reconciliation through Contemporary South African Art; E.Mosely
PART III: MATERIALITY AND MEMORIAL CHALLENGES
Points of No Return: Cultural Heritage and Counter-Memory in Post-Yugoslavia; A.Herscher
Defacing Memory: (Un)tying Peru's Memory Knots; C.E.Milton
(Mis)representations of the Jewish Past in Poland's Memoryscapes: Nationalism, Religion and Political Economies of Commemoration; S.Kapralski
Afterward: The Turn to Pedagogy: a Needed Conversation on the Practice of Curating Difficult Knowledge; R.I.Simon
Index
Copyright © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited
Review:
'How to put difficult knowledge on public display is one of the biggest challenges for curators. It is also of major importance in contemporary civic life: what should be said and shown in museums, and how? This raises fascinating and complex intellectual and political questions. This book exposes and tackles these brilliantly through excellent discussion of a wide range of provocative cases. It should be read by anybody concerned with the dilemmas of curating difficult knowledge.' - Sharon Macdonald, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK
Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, 2023
Jewish Quarterly Review, 2022
Diskursbuch Sprachlosigkeit, 2021
Across Anthropology: Convergences through Museums, Colonial Legacies, and the Curatorial. , 2020
In (Eds.) Jonas Tinius and Margareta von Oswald, (Leuven University Press), 2020: pp. 283-316.
Museum Worlds
Throughout human history, the spread of disease has closed borders, restricted civic movement, an... more Throughout human history, the spread of disease has closed borders, restricted civic movement, and fueled fear of the unknown; yet at the same time, it has helped build cultural resilience. On 11 March 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) classified COVID-19 as a pandemic. The novel zoonotic disease, first reported to the WHO in December 2019, was no longer restricted to Wuhan or to China, as the highly contagious coronavirus had spread to more than 60 countries. The public health message to citizens everywhere was to save lives by staying home; the economic fallout stemming from this sudden rupture of services and the impact on people’s well-being was mindboggling. Around the globe museums, galleries, and popular world heritage sites closed (Associated Press 2020). The Smithsonian Magazine reported that all 19 institutes, including the National Zoo and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), would be closed to the public on 14 March (Daher 2020). On the same day, New...
Museum Worlds, 2019
Looking beyond Poland's internationally lauded new Jewish museums, this article asks how Jews are... more Looking beyond Poland's internationally lauded new Jewish museums, this article asks how Jews are represented in longer-standing folk and ethnographic museums whose mandates have been to represent the historical culture of the Polish nation. How have such museums navigated growing internal pressures to incorporate Jews and reconsider the boundaries of "Polishness" alongside external pressures to rethink the function and approach of ethnographic museology? Based on three museums that have taken three different approaches to Jewishness-what we call cabinet of Jewish curiosities, two solitudes, and ambivalent externalization-we assess the roles played by inherited discourses and structures as well as human agents within and beyond the museum. We illuminate how social debate about the character of the nation (and Jews' place in it) plays out in museums at a moment in their transition from nineteenth-to twenty-first-century paradigms and how a distinctively Polish path toward a "new museology" is emerging in conversation with and resistance to its Western counterparts.
KEYWORDS: critical curating, ethnographic exhibitions, heritage, Jews, multiculturalism, Poland
Holocaust Studies, 2019
Based on preliminary research, we ask what insights can be gleaned about Polish Holocaust memory ... more Based on preliminary research, we ask what insights can be gleaned about Polish Holocaust memory and testimony by examining the prolific art made by Polish ‘folk’ artists, via a range of disciplinary approaches. What can art history, visual culture studies, oral history, anthropology, memory studies, and museum studies tell us about the motivations, functions, and ethical implications of such works? Can they be considered acts of witness? Broadly, our text considers the status of ‘art naïve’ in the contexts of Holocaust representation, ethnographic museology, and bystander testimony.
Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage: Ethnographies of TRACES, 2019
This book presents innovative ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between art, anthrop... more This book presents innovative ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between art, anthropology, and contested cultural heritage, drawing on research from the interdisciplinary TRACES project (funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 program). The case studies in this volume critically assess how and in which arrangements artistic/aesthetic methods and creative everyday practices contribute to strengthening communities both culturally and economically. They also explore the extent to which these methods emphasize minority voices and ultimately set in motion a process of reflexive Europeanisation from below which unfolds within Europe and beyond its borders.
At the heart of the book is the development of a new way of transmitting contentious cultural heritage, which responds to the present situation in Europe of unstable political conditions and a sense of Europe in crisis. With chapters looking at difficult art exhibitions on colonialism, death masks, Holocaust memorials, and skull collections, the contributors articulate a response to the crisis in current economic-political conditions in Europe and advances brand new theoretical groundwork on the configuration of a renewed European identity.
http://www.traces.polimi.it/2018/07/26/from-heritage-communities-to-communities-of-implication/
Polish translation of "Public Pedagogy and Transnational, Transcultural Museums." Poland and Poli... more Polish translation of "Public Pedagogy and Transnational, Transcultural Museums." Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies. (Eds.) Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Iwa Nawrocki. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2018. Pgs. 197-218.
Laboratorium muzeum. Tożsamość. 2016. Pages 68-94.
In: Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies. (Eds.) Irena Grudzinska-Gross... more In: Poland and Polin: New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies. (Eds.) Irena Grudzinska-Gross and Iwa Nawrocki. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2016. Pgs. 197-218.
In Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions. (Eds.) Shelley Butler & Erica Lehrer, 2016, pg... more In Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions. (Eds.) Shelley Butler & Erica Lehrer, 2016, pgs. 46-63.
ZWAM: Zbiór Wiadomości Antropologii Muzealnej (Collected Notes on Museum Anthropology), Volume 3... more ZWAM: Zbiór Wiadomości Antropologii Muzealnej (Collected Notes on Museum Anthropology), Volume 3, Number 1. April 2016.
ZWAM: Zbiór Wiadomości Antropologii Muzealnej (Collected Notes on Museum Anthropology), Volume 2,... more ZWAM: Zbiór Wiadomości Antropologii Muzealnej (Collected Notes on Museum Anthropology), Volume 2, Number 1, spring 2015.
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2015
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714413.2015.1028823
Jewish Cultural Studies No. 4: Framing Jewish Culture: Boundaries and Representations. Edited by ... more Jewish Cultural Studies No. 4: Framing Jewish Culture: Boundaries and Representations. Edited by Simon J. Bronner. Oxford: Littman Library. 2014.
Jews, Money, Myth, 2019
Essay in Jews, Money, Myth exhibition catalog - Jewish Museum London.
An exhibit curated by Peggy E. Daub, Elliot H. Gertel, and Erica T. Lehrer April 11-August 19, 2... more An exhibit curated by Peggy E. Daub, Elliot H. Gertel, and Erica T. Lehrer
April 11-August 19, 2005
Special Collections Library and North Lobby, Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
American Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 4, December 2015, pp. 1195-1216
Krytyka Polityczna 11.02.2014 Krakowska wystawa o Sprawiedliwych Wśród Narodów Świata prezentuje... more Krytyka Polityczna 11.02.2014
Krakowska wystawa o Sprawiedliwych Wśród Narodów Świata prezentuje jednowymiarową, narodową wersję historii.
Cultural Analysis, 2005
https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/\~culturalanalysis/volume4/vol4\_reviews.html
http://aapjstudies.org/manager/external/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Lehrer.pdf
TJH Talks, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFdEfL350Zs&t=1903s
ECHOES Warsaw 2020 Keynote Lecture, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeG9-4SH48g
Keynote, European Association of Jewish Studies annual conference Polin Museum, Warsaw, October 2... more Keynote, European Association of Jewish Studies annual conference
Polin Museum, Warsaw, October 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp0h8LnMquo
https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/antisemitism-podcast/erica-lehrer
American Anthropologist (Visual Anthropology section), Vol. 117, No. 3, September 2015.
In this episode of AnthroTalking we talk to Erica Lehrer and Paulina Fiejdasz on their multimedia... more In this episode of AnthroTalking we talk to Erica Lehrer and Paulina Fiejdasz on their multimedia project “Lucky Jews”. Paulina is a filmmaker and Jewish Studies Scholar and Erica is associate Professor in History and Sociology-Anthropology, and Canada Research Chair in Museum & Heritage Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Their project focuses on a series of small figurines of Jews that are popular in Poland as well as among the people who sell and buy them. We talked about the intersection between anthropology and filmmaking as well as about the stance of the anthropologist as curator. Listen at: http://www.socant.su.se/english/about-us/anthrotalking/erica-lehrer-and-paulina-fiejdasz-on-their-project-lucky-jews-1.254768
Thinking Out Loud, Concordia University, March 30, 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8PqAlQgJw
Magdalena Waligórska speaks to Erica Lehrer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKlXoR6BvDA
American Alliance of Museums blog, in the series Museums and Equity in Times of Crisis., 2020