Recovering Voices, NMNH Community Research Program Internships
Description
Recovering Voices has two unpaid, part-time internship opportunities for the spring/early summer of 2020. (One runs April-May, the other May-June, both with a flexible schedule including start and end dates.) These internships provide a range of museum collections, audiovisual production, and communications experience in a collaborative community program setting. The interns will work primarily with the Recovering Voices program’s Interim Community Research Manager in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
The interns will assist with the Community Research Program, supporting the research of Native communities in the Smithsonian collections and archives. In April, we will host a group from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, and in May, a group from the Blackfeet Nation, visiting DC to study archival materials in the National Anthropological Archives and the collections of the Department of Anthropology at NMNH and the National Museum of the American Indian.
The interns will be responsible for assisting with one community research visit and creating a digital packet of materials to be sent to the group members. Applicants should be interested in audiovisual production and post-production, creating content for the web/social media, and working with museum collections. It is an opportunity for learning audiovisual and digitization skills, learning how museums work with communities, and how knowledge moves between museums and communities through collections research.
Work will be done primarily in the Recovering Voices Office at the National Museum of Natural History, but will also include a week of assignments in the collections at the Museum Support Center in Suitland, MD (transportation provided).
The Recovering Voices Community Research Program leverages the breadth and depth of the Smithsonian’s collections to support language and traditional knowledge revitalization research by communities.
Learning Objectives
There are four core learning objectives:
1 - Learn about the subject of language and traditional knowledge documentation and revitalization.
2 - Learn about the uses and benefits of material culture and archival resources available at the Smithsonian, and museums in general, to understand the impact of resources in museum collections on revitalization efforts.
3 - Learn audiovisual documentation, standards for archiving born-digital products, and post-production of digital video.
4 - Learn and practice writing for the web, targeting a variety of audiences.
To apply, submit a resume and cover letter to [email protected] by February 7, 2020. Include information about your availability and preferred start date.