Job Announcement: Head of Research and Collections; Welfare Association Palestinian Museum Taskforce

[Welfare Association logo.] [Welfare Association logo.]

Job Announcement: Head of Research and Collections; Welfare Association Palestinian Museum Taskforce

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Head of Research and Collections

Deadline for receiving applications is Sunday August 7, 2011.

 

Send all application materials to palestinianmuseum@gmail.com


Brief Job Description

Reporting to the Director of Museum Operations, and working as a member of the Senior Leadership team of the Museum, and as the Senior Curator of the Museum, the Head of Research and Collections provides day-to-day leadership and direction to the curatorial team and staff within the Division. The Head contributes to the development of annual operating budgets and corporate plans ensuring that the Division’s programmes are sufficiently supported and recognized in these institutional documents. The Head develops and maintains standards, criteria and guidelines to assure that curatorial and research efforts are carried out in a thorough and objective manner and adhere to established academic norms as represented by the finest universities and museums. The Head develops and maintains standards, criteria and guidelines for the development of all collections and collection management systems consistent with the Museum’s operating budget, corporate plan and international best practice.

General and Operational Duties and Responsibilities

Research

  • Responsible for managing the Museum’s research programmes in Tangible Culture, Intangible Culture, and Society & History by coordinating the Museum’s curators (including Adjunct Curators or contract staff) in all matters of research, documentation, and publication advancing knowledge on and about Palestinian issues consistent with the Museum’s mission, vision and goals.
  • Provides leadership in the academic interpretation of the Museum’s collections.
  • Conducts original research in at least one area of Tangible Culture, Intangible Culture, and Society & History supportive of the Museum’s mission, vision and goals.
  • Ensures curatorial participation in exhibition development teams and ensures that all Museum exhibits and programmes are based on academically sound research and presented in a balanced manner.
  • Monitors storyline development, selection of objects, illustrations, and supporting media for all exhibitions, and coordinates the drafting of interpretive text (in the Hub, Branches, and Centres of Palestinian Culture).

Collections (including Library and Archive Collections)

  • Management of all Museum collections including: acquisition, deaccessions and disposals, registration, incoming loans, organization, storage, and preservation.
  • Oversees the Museum’s collecting strategies (part of the corporate plan), recommending    to the Taskforce collections-related policies and developing procedures for ensuring the approved policies are adhered to by reviewing and continually evaluating the Museum’s policies and procedures.
  • Oversees proper documentation procedures for all collections.
  • As part of an institutional programme, cultivates donor relations in order to garner support for the Museum’s collections.

Supervisory Duties and Responsibilities

  • Provides direct overview and oversight of the members of the Division team as to the performance of their duties, their efficacy, and their adherence to all appropriate policies, practices and directives.
  • Responsible for ensuring that short- and long-term range goals are developed and implemented by the Divisional team to achieve organizational goals.
  • Carries out performance review for direct reports of the Department Heads.

Financial Duties and Responsibilities

  • Guides and directs the development and expenditure of the Division’s budget, financial planning and goal setting for all research, collections and library programmes.
  • Monitors the preparation of grant applications supporting the Museum’s research, collections and documentation and archival programmes.

General Requirements and Qualifications

  • A minimum of Master’s Degree and two years experience, in Palestinian history, art, anthropology, archaeology or a closely related field, or equivalent life and work experience.
  • Expertise and proven research interest in one or more of the Museum’s core curatorial areas (Tangible Culture, Intangible Culture, and Society & History).
  • A proven background in scholarly research.
  • Demonstrated managerial, planning, organizational and administrative skills; strong interpersonal and excellent written/oral communication skills; high level of presentation skills.
  • Ability to provide strong leadership and strategic direction; inspire and motivate staff, volunteers and donors; establish and maintain effective working relationships with a variety of representatives of public and private organizations, private collectors, universities, support groups, and the general public.
  • Ability to manage and work within a team and to delegate appropriate responsibilities and authorities while providing appropriate oversight.
  • Spoken and written fluency in Arabic, strong reading ability in English and good spoken English are preferences. Competency in other languages is a benefit.
  • Ability to reside in the West Bank and travel extensively internationally.

Nature of Employment and Compensation

  • The Head of Research and Collections is a contract position.
  • Salary is to be negotiated, based on relevant and related experience and education.
  • Benefits are to be negotiated but will be competitive for comparable positions at organizations similar in activities and scope in the region.

 

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      Long Form Podcast Episode 7: Think Tanks and Manufactuing Consent with Mandy Turner (4 June)

      In this episode, Mandy Turner discusses the vital role think tanks play in the policy process, and in manufacturing consent for government policy. Turner recently published a landmark study of leading Western think tanks and their positions on Israel and Palestine, tracing pronounced pro-Israel bias, where the the key role is primarily the work of senior staff within these institutions, the so-called “gatekeepers.”

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412