Theorizing Museums

Author : Sharon Macdonald,Gordon Fyfe
Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 1998-06-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0631201513

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Theorizing Museums by Sharon Macdonald,Gordon Fyfe Pdf

Museums are key cultural loci of our times. They are symbols and sites for the playing out of social relations of identity and difference, knowledge and power, theory and representation. These are issues at the heart of contemporary anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. This volume brings together original contributions from international scholars to show how social and cultural theory can bring new insight to debate about museums. Analytical perspectives on the museum are drawn from the anthropology and sociology of globalization, time, space and consumption, as well as from feminism, psychoanalysis, experimental ethnography and literary theory. These perspectives are brought to bear on questions of museums' changing role and position in the representation of the nation-state, of community, and of gender, class and ethnicity. The examples in this book are drawn from different kinds of museum around the world, and include significant controversial and experimental exhibitions; the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian; feminist exhibitions in Scandinavia; the National Museum of Sri Lanka; Victorian art at the Tate; the representation of race at Colonial Williamsburg and of colonialism and identity in Canada.

Author : Monika Stobiecka
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 155 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2023-06-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000889277

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Theorizing Archaeological Museum Studies by Monika Stobiecka Pdf

Theorizing Archaeological Museum Studies works towards reconnecting archaeological practice, the theoretical richness of archaeology, and museum studies. The book therefore embraces both the practical aspects of archaeology and empirical studies in museums in order to rethink what happens when an artefact changes into an exhibit. This study is positioned at the intersection of both history and archaeological theory, and of the history of art and museum studies. The central focus of this book explores the relationship between museums and their dominant paradigms, on the one hand, and new approaches and theories in archaeology, on the other. It thus also illustrates the co-dependencies, relations and tensions that characterize the relationship between academia and museums. This book demonstrates how in becoming exhibits, artefacts have – and continue to – become reflections of the discipline’s prevailing paradigms while manifesting the dominant aims and methods of knowledge production pertaining at a given time and place, as well as the desired social interpretations and modes of presenting the past. Theorizing Archaeological Museum Studies offers important insights for academics and students (archaeology, heritage studies, museum studies) as well as for practitioners (museum employees, heritage practitioners). The book is also intended for scholars from across the humanities interested in museum studies, heritage studies, curatorial studies, cultural studies, cultural geography, material culture, history of archaeology, archaeological theory, and the anthropology of things.

Author : Andrea Witcomb,Kylie Message
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 648 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2020-11-17
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781119796558

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Museum Theory by Andrea Witcomb,Kylie Message Pdf

MUSEUM THEORY EDITED BY ANDREA WITCOMB AND KYLIE MESSAGE Museum Theory offers critical perspectives drawn from a broad range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. This volume describes and challenges previous ways of understanding museums and their relationship to society. Essays written by scholars from museology and other disciplines address theoretical reflexivity in the museum, exploring the contextual, theoretical, and pragmatic ways museums work, are understood, and are experienced. Organized around three themes—Thinking about Museums, Disciplines and Politics, and Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory—the text includes discussion and analysis of different kinds of museums from various, primarily contemporary, national and local contexts. Essays consider subjects including the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere, cutting-edge museum practice and their connections with current global concerns, and the links between museum studies and disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, and history.

Author : Sharon MacDonald,Gordon Fyfe
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:609446845

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Theorizing Museums by Sharon MacDonald,Gordon Fyfe Pdf

Author : Sheila E. R. Watson
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 585 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780415402590

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Museums and Their Communities by Sheila E. R. Watson Pdf

Using case studies drawn from all areas of museum studies, Museums and their Communities explores the museums as a site of representation, identity and memory, and considers how it can influence its community. Focusing on the museum as an institution, and its social and cultural setting, Sheila Watson examines how museums use their roles as informers and educators to empower, or to ignore, communities. Looking at the current debates about the role of the museum, she considers contested values in museum functions and examines provision, power, ownership, responsibility, and institutional issues. This book is of great relevance for all disciplines as it explores and questions the role of the museum in modern society.

Author : Sharon Macdonald
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 598 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2011-08-24
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781444357943

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A Companion to Museum Studies by Sharon Macdonald Pdf

A Companion to Museum Studies captures the multidisciplinary approach to the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society. Collects first-rate original essays by leading figures from a range of disciplines and theoretical stances, including anthropology, art history, history, literature, sociology, cultural studies, and museum studies Examines the complexity of the museum from cultural, political, curatorial, historical and representational perspectives Covers traditional subjects, such as space, display, buildings, objects and collecting, and more contemporary challenges such as visiting, commerce, community and experimental exhibition forms

Author : Judith Hamera
Publisher : SAGE Publications
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2005-07-08
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781452267050

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Opening Acts by Judith Hamera Pdf

Opening Acts provides new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. It offers cutting-edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach. Key Features: Familiarizes readers with the core elements and commitments of performance-based analysis Links performance-based analysis to theoretical and analytical perspectives in communication and cultural studies Provides engaging examples of how to use performance as a critical tool to open up communication and culture combines the best features of two classroom formats. Like a reader, it offers a menu of diverse approaches to performance-based analysis. Like a monograph, these approaches are organized into a coherent conceptual and pedagogical frame. Explicitly links developments in performance theory and methodology to current theories and methodologies in communication and cultural studies. Its topical organization mirrors those theoretical and methodological concerns most likely to engage students and scholars: how to analyze practices of everyday life, history, space, and intersections of all three. Opening Acts works across the divisions of communication and cultural studies, including elements of interpersonal, organizational, and rhetorical communication, feminism, critical pedagogy, ethnography, and visual studies.

Author : Viv Golding,Wayne Modest
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2013-08-15
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780857851321

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Museums and Communities by Viv Golding,Wayne Modest Pdf

This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.

Author : Colin Divall,Andrew Scott
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2001-12-20
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780718501068

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Making Histories in Transport Museums by Colin Divall,Andrew Scott Pdf

This book is the first in 30 years to take transport museums seriously as vehicles for the making of public histories. Drawing upon many years' experience of visiting and working in transport museums around the world, the authors argue that the sector's historical roots are more complex than is usually thought. Written from a multidisciplinary perspective but firmly rooted in the practice of making public histories, this book brings the study of transport museums firmly into the mainstream of academic and professional debate.>

Author : Christopher Whitehead
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 171 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2013-11-20
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781472521415

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Museums and the Construction of Disciplines by Christopher Whitehead Pdf

Museums and museum politics were important elements in the development of the disciplines of Archaeology and Art History in nineteenth-century Britain. Here Christopher Whitehead explores some of the key debates and events which led to the conceptual differentiation and physical separation of 'archaeological' and 'artistic' material culture, looking especially at the ways in which objects and histories were contested within museum politics. For example, in the 1850s, the status of Egyptian antiquities as 'art' or 'archaeology' was keenly debated, and this related closely to questions about which kinds of museum should house them and the possible histories and epistemologies in which they might figure. This concise study serves as a basis for a discussion of the continued intellectual legacy of this for our understanding, management and presentation of the past in the museum and in curricula. It is argued that by understanding the politics and circumstances through which the two disciplines were delimited and distinguished from one another we may be able to glimpse, retrospectively, the possibility of alternative art histories and alternative archaeologies.

Author : Gönül Bozoğlu
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2019-09-18
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780429638237

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Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture by Gönül Bozoğlu Pdf

Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture examines the politics of emotion in history museums, combining approaches and concerns from museum, heritage and memory studies, anthropology and studies of emotion. Exploring the meanings and politics of memory contests in Turkey, a site for complex negotiations of identity, the book asks what it means for museums to charge the past with political agendas through spectacular, emotive representations. Providing an in-depth examination of emotional practice in two Turkish museums that present contrasting representations of the national past, the book analyses relationships between memory, governmentality, identity, and emotion. The museums discussed celebrate Ottoman and Early Republican pasts, linking to geo- and party politics, people’s senses of who they are, popular memory culture, and competing national stories and identities vis-à-vis Europe and the wider world. Both museums use dramatic, emotive panoramas as key displays and the research at the heart of this book explores this seemingly anachronistic choice, and how it links with memory cultures to prompt visitors to engage imaginatively, socially, politically and morally with a particular version of the past. Although the book focuses on museums in Turkey, it uses this as a platform to address broader questions about memory culture, emotion, and identity. As such, Museums and Memory Culture should be of great interest to academics and students around the world who are engaged in the study of museums, heritage, culture, history, politics, anthropology, sociology, and the psychology of emotion.

Author : Andrea Witcomb
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2003-08-29
Category : Reference
ISBN : 9781134598885

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Re-Imagining the Museum by Andrea Witcomb Pdf

Re-Imagining the Museum presents new interpretations of museum history and contemporary museum practices. Through a range of case studies from the UK, North America and Australia, Andrea Witcomb moves away from the idea that museums are always 'conservative' to suggest they have a long history of engaging with popular culture and addressing a variety of audiences. She argues that museums are key mediators between high and popular culture and between government, media practitioners, cultural policy-makers and museums professionals. Analyzing links between museums and the media, looking at the role of museums in cities, and discussing the effects on museums of cultural policies, Re-Imagining the Museum presents a vital tool in the study of museum practice.

Author : Ruth B. Phillips
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2011-10-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780773587465

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Museum Pieces by Ruth B. Phillips Pdf

Ruth Phillips argues that these practices are "indigenous" not only because they originate in Aboriginal activism but because they draw on a distinctively Canadian preference for compromise and tolerance for ambiguity. Phillips dissects seminal exhibitions of Indigenous art to show how changes in display, curatorial voice, and authority stem from broad social, economic, and political forces outside the museum and moves beyond Canadian institutions and practices to discuss historically interrelated developments and exhibitions in the United States, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. Drawing on forty years of experience as an art historian, curator, exhibition critic, and museum director, she emphasizes the complex and situated nature of the problems that face museums, introducing new perspectives on controversial exhibitions and moments of contestation. A manifesto that calls on us to re-imagine the museum as a place to embrace global interconnectedness, Museum Pieces emphasizes the transformative power of museum controversy and analyses shifting ideas about art, authenticity, and power in the modern museum.

Author : Gerard Corsane
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2004-11-10
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781134439638

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Heritage, Museums and Galleries by Gerard Corsane Pdf

Bringing the reader the very best of modern scholarship from the heritage community, this comprehensive reader outlines and explains the many diverse issues that have been identified and brought to the fore in the field of heritage, museums and galleries over the past couple of decades. The volume is divided into four parts: presents overviews and useful starting points for critical reflection focuses more specifically on selected issues of significance, looking particularly at the museum's role and responsibilities in the postmodern and postcolonial world concentrates on issues related to cultural heritage and tourism dedicated to public participation in heritage, museum and gallery processes and activities. The book provides an ideal starting point for those coming to the study of museums and galleries for the first time.

Author : Bronwyn Bevan,Bahia Ramos
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 133 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2021-08-30
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781000427806

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Theorizing Equity in the Museum by Bronwyn Bevan,Bahia Ramos Pdf

Theorizing Equity in the Museum integrates the perspectives of learning researchers and museum practitioners to shed light on the deep-seated structures that must be accounted for if the field is to move past aspirations and rhetoric and towards more inclusive practices. Written during a time when museums around the world were being forced to reckon with their institutional practices of exclusion; their histories of colonization, both cultural and intellectual; and, for many, their tenuous business models, the chapters leverage a range of theoretical perspectives to explore lived experiences of working in the museum towards changing the museum. Theories of spatial justice, critical pedagogy, culturally relevant pedagogy, critical race theory, and others are used to consider how the museum’s dominant cultural structures and norms collide with museum professionals’ aspirations for inclusive practices. The chapters present a mix of empirical research and reflections, which collectively operate to theorize the museum as a potential force for enriching, empowering, and transforming an inclusive public’s relationship with some of our most powerful ideas and aspirations. But first they must change, from the inside out. Grounded in practice and practical problems, Theorizing Equity in the Museum demonstrates how theory can be used as a practical tool for change. As a result the book will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, education, learning and culture, as well as to museum practitioners with an interest in equity and inclusion.