Monuments, Museums, & Meaning: How Politics Shapes Memory in Artifacts is a course where Carleton students examine museums and monuments as important types of political communication that preserve cultural artifacts, create historical records, and tell present and future generations the meaning of communities and individuals. As part of the course, I worked with a team of four other students to produce my own monument and museum exhibit on the pro-democracy resistance movement in Myanmar.
For this assignment, my group and I had to select a contemporary topic to memorialize and build an exhibit using only 10 images or fewer. The images had to stand for themselves and could only have captions, including citations, that were shorter than forty words. By minimalizing text, students had to select photos that were visually powerful and conveyed meaning through symbols and imagery. The final project was thus a practice in visual political communication.
My group had several connections to the movement in Myanmar that made it an important topic for us to address. In curating this exhibit, we discussed our use of language (“Burmese people” versus “people of Burma”), the rise of technology in social movements, and parallels between resistance movements in Myanmar and the United States. You can read my analytical reflection on the exhibit here.
The construction of this exhibit caused me to reflect on the role of technology within activism. Within Myanmar, technology has enabled protesters to organize and raise international awareness of government injustices. Completing a virtual exhibit on this subject perpetuates the digital revolution and speaks to the role that museums and other academic institutions can play in making social change.
