Culturally-specific institutions in 2024: The DACC
Speaker:
Jorien Van Beukering, PhD candidate, School of Languages and Cultures
Abstract:
This presentation is based on a work-in-progress investigating culturally-specific archives and museums, which first cropped up in migrant communities in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. But how are these institutions faring today, some seventy years after they first appeared? To better understand the role of culturally-specific archives and museums in contemporary Australian society, it is necessary to examine how these organisations have evolved since the 1950s. Using the Dutch Australian Cultural Centre (DACC, founded 1983) and its Archive and Library as a case study, I investigate the challenges and opportunities culturally-specific institutions present to the communities that manage and access them. I argue that culturally-specific institutions like the DACC need to re-orient themselves to contemporary audiences. For the DACC, founded by people who migrated to Australia after the Second World War, this means engaging with a wider range of Dutch Australians: not only the post-war migrants but also their children and grandchildren, and skilled migrants and their families who migrated to Australia since 2000.
About Studies in Culture Events
Through the scholarly analysis of many different kinds of cultural products, texts and phenomena, Studies in Culture brings together researchers who seek to understand how the world is understood differently by people coming from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Researchers in this cluster work on literature, film, music, theatre, the visual arts, intangible heritage, testimonies and historical narratives.
Research in Studies in Culture within the School centres around four broad sub-themes of Heritage, memory and trauma studies; Intellectual and cultural history; Literature; and Film and visual cultures.
To view more on the research and interests of the Studies in Culture cluster, please click here.