Introduction
Digital Dilemmas to guide the Museum’s 2023–2024 programming
The international Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum has selected “digital dilemmas” as the guiding theme for the coming year. Alongside numerous partners from the world of humanitarian action, culture and research, the Museum will explore ideas and techniques that can be applied to to day-to-day life. For its forthcoming programming cycle, it will hold a series of events on digital dilemmas, curated by Valérie Gorin, from the Geneva Center of Humanitarian studies, and Oonagh Murphy, from Goldsmith University.
The launch of the Year of “digital dilemmas” coincides with the publication of “10 ideas for a caring Museum”, a compendium of the lessons learned from the Museum’s Year of Mental Health (2022-2023). The document, published online and written by Marzia Varutti, is the second toolkit we published.
Oonagh Murphy | Co-curator
Dr Oonagh Murphy, advises cultural organisations, government bodies, and funders worldwide on digital strategy, policy and practice. She is a widely published author whose writings have appeared in The Guardian, Arts Professional, The Irish Times, and many academic journals and books. She is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was formerly Course Director of the MA in Visual Arts Management and Curating at Richmond the American International University (London).
In 2019 she worked with The National Gallery and The Metropolitan Museum of Art to establish The Museums + AI Network, this timely action research project defined a new field of practice which sits at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Museology. She has been working as an advisor, writer, and lecturer since the early 2010s and contributes to emerging global conversations around tech policy, data rights, public commons, and public purpose institutions in a digital world, and is a regular keynote speaker and facilitator at events, forums and conferences. She is a member of the College of Experts at DCMS (UK Government department) and supports the development of evidence-based policy making that shapes policy and practice across the Arts, Heritage and Tourism Portfolio. She is an Open Data Institute Accredited Data Ethics Facilitator and Data Ethics Professional.
Valérie Gorin | Co-curator
Valérie Gorin is Head of Learning at the Geneva Center of Humanitarian Studies. She is also a Senior Lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel. She was previously invited professor at SciencesPo Lille, visiting scholar at Carleton University in Ottawa and a Senior Researcher of the Swiss National Foundation at the University of Lausanne.
Her areas of research focus on the visual culture and history of humanitarianism, humanitarian communication, media crisis reporting, and photojournalism. She has published extensively on photojournalism, visual culture and advocacy in Digital Journalism (2015), the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (2017), Humanitarianism and the Media, 1900-2015 (Berghahn Books, 2018). She also co-edited special issues about the responses to famine (European Review of History, 2015), the representations of migration (Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies, 2018), humanitarian advocacy (Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, 2021) as well as images and emotions (with B. Edgar and D. Martin Moruno) Making Humanitarian Crises: Emotions and Images in History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).