Refugee Material Culture Initiative
Location: Fowler A190B
Faculty Director: Kelly Nguyen
Graduate Students: Elisa McAtee, Roderick Zoe Hibberd
Undergraduate Students: Charley Walsh
Research Affiliates: Mai Vu, Doug Daniels, Deidre Brin
RMCI website
Vietnamese Heritage Museum
Việt Museum
Contact
Mailing address:
Cotsen Institute of Archaeology
308 Charles E. Young Drive North
Box 951519, A190B Fowler
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Phone (Cotsen Main office): 310-206-8934
RMCI team and affiliates at the Public Affairs Capstone Showcase.
The Refugee Material Culture Initiative (RMCI) is a community-engaged, digital humanities project with the aims of digitally preserving art and artifacts made/used by refugees, creating a free and accessible database of the digital outputs, and generating educational resources on refugee histories. It is our expressed goal to feature the diversity and complexity of refugee experiences and to affirm that refugees are powerful knowledge producers.
At this initial stage, RMCI is working closely with our community partner, the Vietnamese Heritage Museum located in Garden Grove, CA, to digitize their refugee artifact collection. We hope that this initial phase will serve as a proof of concept for engaging other refugee communities. As the project develops, we aim to include materials from those who have been forcibly displaced in the creation of a postcustodial digital archive—that is, one where artifacts from the community will be digitized and then given back to them. In this way, different communities may be in conversation with each other, including those who do not fit under the limiting legal definition of “refugee”—and in so doing, critique and redefine the very concept of “refugee” itself.
Kelly Nguyen and Doug Daniels 3D scanning the "Boat of Hope" in the Vietnamese Heritage Musuem (VHM). Photograph credit Vietnamese Heritage Museum.
RMCI team and affiliates examining artifacts. Photograph credit: Vietnamese Heritage Museum.