Robin Boast

Robin Benville Boast (born 2 March 1956) is the Professor Emeritus at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies. Until the end of 2012 Prof. Boast was an Associate Professor and Curator for World Archaeology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. In December 2021, Prof. Boast retired from the University of Amsterdam where he taught for nine years on Cultural Information Science, Neo-colonial information governance, and the history and sociology of digitally and collecting.

He has been a Visiting Professor at the European University Institute in Florence, a Principal Investigator/Scientific Advisor for several EU projects, and was the Director of the Virtual Teaching Collection Project. Boast has worked in museums in the US and Britain for over 30 years, specializing in museum access, classification and documentation, especially around diverse knowledge communities. Through a program of historical, theoretical and practical inquiry, his research explores forms of informed, collaborative and critical access to museum spaces and collections. Boast is currently working with many indigenous communities around the world that seek to enable and re-centre the many dimensions of local knowledge expertise within the academy – research informed by the critiques of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Post-colonial studies, Indigenous Studies and collaborative developments in e-Science.

He has worked for several years on an international research project which subjects the museum and the academy to the ethnographic gaze of indigenous partners to de-centre the ownership and control of research of indigenous patrimony. Prof. Boast has worked with source community museums and heritage organizations with Ramesh Srinivasan and James Enote, primarily at the A:shiwi A:wan Museum & Heritage Center in Zuni, New Mexico (USA). Most recently, Boast has been involved with repatriation and archiving projects with the Office of Indigenous Strategy and Engagement, Flinders University. His recent book projects include ''The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and its Consequences'', as well as an ongoing book project on Digital Information.

Prof. Boast is the Chair of the EU's [https://pro.europeana.eu/page/research-advisory-board Europeana Research Advisory Board] Provided by Wikipedia