Dr Jordana Blejmar is currently working on an AHRC-funded project (2022-2024) Cold War Toys: Material Cultures of Childhood in Argentina with assistance from Erika Teichert. The project analyses toys as historical documents and cultural icons during the Cold War, specifically between the emergence of Peronism in the 1940s and the end of the last civic-military dictatorship in 1983. Blejmar and Teichert are working with consultants and an advisory team and two institutional partners in Argentina: the Remembrance Park-Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism and the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory. On 6 August 2022, the exhibition Scale 1/43 will open at the Parque de la Memoria/Remembrance Park in Buenos Aires. It includes building blocks distributed by the Fundación Eva Perón, toys manufactured and sold in Argentina during the Malvinas/Falklands War (1982), and toy-art, photographs and installations commemorating those disappeared during the military dictatorship. For more information please email: coldwartoys@gmail.com or visit the Project’s Website: https://coldwartoys.wixsite.com/cold-war-toys
Professor Claire Taylor is currently leading a team of colleagues on an AHRC funded project, Memory, Victims and Representation of the Colombian Conflict which has also led to several follow-on funded projects, including one on Archives of Human Rights and Historical Memory, and another entitled A Museum For Me/Un Museo Para Mí which involves collaborating with NGO partners and museums in Colombia who work in the areas of human rights, victim representation and memories of conflict. The project sets out to develop and implement creative museum products, practices and spaces that will promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, and support these institutions in their human rights work. The museums involved include the Museo de la Independencia in Colombia and the Museo Afro de Colombia (a new museum under development). The team are also collaborating with five community groups including the Organización Femenina Popular, which promotes historical memory about the impact of armed conflict on girls and women in Magdalena Medio, and raises awareness of their experiences of empowerment and resistance.
Professor Sara Cohen (Department of Music) and Dr. Lisa Shaw (Department of Languages, Cultures and Film) are leading the ‘Chile in Liverpool: Music and Memories’ research project, which works with people who came to the UK, and particularly Merseyside, as exiles from Chile in the 1970s and 1980s, and their descendants, to explore the role that music has played in their everyday lives and how it relates to their identity, sense of community and heritage. The project draws on and seeks to expand the Robert Pring-Mill Collection, part of the Popular Music Archive at the University of Liverpool, which contains a wealth of material relating to Latin American music, and particularly ‘songs of hope and struggle’ from Chile, as Pring-Mill himself described them. A short film and a podcast series about the project, the Collection and Robert Pring-Mill can be accessed here
https://linktr.ee/chileenliverpool
Dr Alyssa Grossman is currently working on a project funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, with Selena Kimball, Associate Professor of Fine Art at Parsons The New School in New York. Their collaboration, ‘Little Familiar Objects: Decolonising Erland Nordenskiöld’s Collection of Rocks’, involves anthropological fieldwork and artistic research in the archives of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, and will result in a book publication and a traveling museum exhibition. The work instigates new methods of object categorization and archival interpretation, and critically challenges the colonial legacy of contemporary practices of anthropological classification and representation.