The African Studies Center is delighted to announce and invite the campus community to a virtual Practitioners Symposium hosted under the auspices of the Ubuntu Dialogues: Museums and Communities Connect project. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project is a partnership between the MSU African Studies Center and the Stellenbosch University Museum at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa.

Committed to establishing new connections and to strengthening existing ones among universities, museums and communities, the project places a premium on transnational dialogue and engagement among students and faculty, museum and cultural heritage practitioners, and community partners in the U.S., South Africa, and around the world. The project includes three main components: virtual student dialogues, speaker exchange seminars and an internship/reciprocal student exchange program.

The idea of the Practitioners Symposium came out of the need to build bridges across the academic and non-academic, formal and non-formal, theoretical and applied divides. The first of a two-part series, the Symposium is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. EST on July 13, 2021. The half-day special event will offer a much-needed interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral platform for exploring the complex confluence of opportunities and challenges found among the heritage, creative arts and scholar communities serving people of African descent. 

Symposium organizers have made the effort to connect community leaders, civil rights activists, change agents, practitioners, professionals and academics whose work informs, adds to, or complicates the concepts of Ubuntu, Pan-Africanism and decolonization.

Panelists include curators and leaders from institutions such as the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (Detroit), the Pave the Way – I-496 Project (Lansing, Mich.), the Ashé Cultural Arts Center (New Orleans), Mind-Builders Creative Arts Center (Bronx, N.Y.), the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (D.C.), the Ray Charles Program in African-American Material Culture (New Orleans) and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (East Lansing, Mich.). The Symposium also features panels with the founders and executive directors of the community-based Ubuntu Village in Flint, Mich., the Ubuntu Village in New Orleans; and the Ubuntu Village in Trenton, N.J.; and with the producer and co-directors of the movie “Hoops Africa: Ubuntu Matters.”

Panelists will have the opportunity for critical reflection as they engage with each other and with attendees on the meanings of Ubuntu, Pan-Africanism and decolonization as concepts and as practice. Similarly, they will reflect on sport, cultural heritage and creative arts as sites of memory and dialogue; on modalities for collaborative engagement with diverse publics and community ecosystems; and on responsive and financially viable paths toward inclusion.

The Symposium is free and open to the public. To register, please follow this link. A confirmation email will be sent to you shortly after registration with instructions on joining the meeting on July 13. Also, please feel free to share the event flyer with anyone in your networks and communities who might be interested in being part of the conversations.

For any questions about the Symposium, please reach out to Upenyu Majee, MSU project manager for the Ubuntu Dialogues project, at majeeupe@msu.edu.