Our people
Dr Philipp Schorch
Position: Alfred Deakin Research Institute Research FellowPhone: +61 3 925 17818
Fax:
Email: philipp.schorch@deakin.edu.au
Campus: B
University recorded publications
Researcher output profile for Dr Philipp Schorch
Brief Biography
Dr. Philipp Schorch’s research is situated at the intersection of culture, religion, identity politics, museums and meaning. He examines museums as particular places, spaces and empirical realities to interrogate seemingly universal concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ producing empirically situated, contextualised and rich theoretical propositions of significance for the human sciences in general as well as critical museum and heritage studies in particular.
Philipp completed his PhD in 2011 with the Museum and Heritage Studies programme at Victoria University of Wellington. Drawing on a long-term narrative study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), the thesis humanised Te Papa as a particular global public sphere, or discursive space. It did so by using a critical hermeneutic analysis to facilitate an understanding of ‘cross-cultural dialogue’ and the ‘public sphere’ as interpretive actions, movements and performances made by cultural actors. By exploring individual experiences instead of totalised abstractions, this study dissected the complexity of cultural worldmaking and politics elucidating ‘interpretive contests’ and their ‘enunciation’. Due to the in-depth empirical insights and their multilayered contextualisation, the idea of the museum as a ‘forum’ could then evolve from an abstract idea into a concrete discursive world of negotiations.
Philipp joined Deakin University as a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute (ADRI) in 2012. His current project Museums, public spheres, and the dialogue of cultures and religions is fundamentally concerned with the interdisciplinary study of processes of intercultural mediation, focussing specifically on the empirical investigation of cross-cultural and inter-religious encounters and dialogue. Using the examples of two Australian museums that are explicitly predicated on the possibility and desirability of cross-cultural and inter-religious communication, the project seeks to augment current normative and theoretical approaches with a longitudinal narrative study exploring the ways in which such communication is lived and negotiated by cultural actors, or museum visitors. Philipp is also a Research Fellow at the Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Pacific (CHCAP) involved in the ARC funded project Collecting Institutions, cultural diversity and the making of citizenship in Australia since the 1970s. He has presented at several international conferences, published in academic books and journals, and received various awards, scholarships and research grants.
