Philipp Schorch

Philipp Schorch looked at Te Papa as a global public sphere, or discursive space, studying individual experiences of visitors at the museum.

I completed my PhD in 2011 with the Museum and Heritage Studies programme. The title of my thesis was: Te Papa, a forum for the world?: a narrative exploration of a global public sphere. Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the thesis humanised Te Papa as a global public sphere, or discursive space. It did so by using a critical hermeneutic analysis to facilitate an understanding of ‘cross-cultural dialogue’ and the ‘public sphere’ as interpretive actions, movements and performances made by cultural actors. By exploring individual experiences instead of totalised abstractions, this study dissected the complexity of cultural worldmaking and politics elucidating ‘interpretive contests’ and their ‘enunciation’. Due to the in-depth empirical insights and their multilayered contextualisation, the idea of the museum as a ‘forum’ could then evolve from an abstract idea into a concrete discursive world of negotiations.

After holding fellowships at Deakin University, Australia, and the Institute of Advanced Study at Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany, I held a Marie Curie Research Fellow, European Commission, at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. The project ‘Assembling the Transpacific: Indigenous Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Source Communities’ involved a multi-sited, collaborative ethnographic investigation of contemporary Indigenous curatorial practices in three Pacific museums (Bishop Museum, Hawai’i; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; and Museo Rapa Nui, Easter Island).

Currently, I am Head of Research at the State Ethnographic Collections Saxony, Germany, and Honorary Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia. My research focusses on museums, material culture/history/theory, contemporary art and (post)colonial histories, the Pacific and Europe, and collaborations with Indigenous artists/curators/scholars. I am co-editor of the volumes Transpacific Americas: Encounters and Engagements between the Americas and the South Pacific (Routledge, 2016) and Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship (Manchester University Press, 2018). The latter was developed and edited with A/Prof. Conal McCarthy, as one of several projects on which I am collaborating with the Museum and Heritage Studies programme at Victoria University of Wellington.

Apart from engaging with the joys and hardships of academic labour, I continue to travel the world. Being a passionate Futsal (indoor football) player, I leave no doubt on which side of the Tasman my sporting loyalty rests. Viva Aoteaora!