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25/05/2018 - 10:05

A new website for my favourite things

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A new website, hh.hi.is, has been launched for My favourite things; Material culture archives, cultural heritage and meaning.  This project is led by Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Professor of Cultural History at the Faculty of History and Philosophy and recently received a three year grant from the Icelandic Centre for Research (Rannís). The team behind the project is comprised of thirteen Icelandic scholars, in addition to five international academics.

The research project is built on the contribution of research scholars in the field of history, material culture (archaeology and anthropology) as well as museum studies. The focus of the research is twofold. First, emphasis is put on exploring the phenomenon of “archive”; how an image of the past is preserved, how people and their material environment are documented in historical sources. Second, focus will be on how the “archive” as a phenomenon and analytical concept has been employed in research within humanities and social sciences. Here the emphasis is on how material culture has been archived; what things did people own according to different archives, and how were they used? How did people relate to things, what was their ideological value and everyday significance? Different archives of material culture will be counter posed, thus revealing opportunities to scrutinise the various ideas about the past from a new perspective, and simultaneously providing a new foundation for reviewing academics and scholarship. A fundamental notion behind this approach is the view that material culture and an insight into the materiality of the everyday enables a different and more nuanced perspective on how people structured their lives and identities, and how their material surroundings contributed to that structuring.
Further information can be found at hh.hi.is.
 

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