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The Othering Museum

Author : Carrie Westwater

Publisher : Springer Nature

Page : 229 pages

File Size : 44,43 MB

Release : 2024

Category : Museums

ISBN : 3031554329

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Book Description

Zusammenfassung: The term "othering" refers to a persistent Us and Them dynamic between museums and their participating public. To reframe this historically paternalistic subject-positioning, over the last decade or so many museums have made firm attempts to address this by attempting to move from being "providers" of engagements to facilitating access to cultural right by embedding co-curatorial techniques and participation. Through the analysis of three co-curated participatory case studies, this book examines how power performs in co-curatorial museum practice. It discusses how it is not just how the participatory process is enacted that is necessary to create this shift to a more socially just profile, but systemic pressures of vulnerability and responsibility found in the political economy of the museum and its participants. This book will chart how this dynamic performs in museums when working with different groups of people, such as volunteers, community participants, and professional artists, presented with differing levels of co-curatorial decision making. The book further investigates whether performances of power are relational to who the participants are, how the processes of participation are constructed, and where the participation takes place, what language is used when conducting these relationships and what the funded institutional responsibilities do to the co-curators (the community and museum staff) when traditional co-curation and co-curation in transition to non-selective curation is applied. Grounding this discussion is the development of this test method of non-selective curation which further illuminates some of these challenges and aims to successfully mitigate them through a radically open and inclusive approach to co-curation. Dr Carrie Westwater is a Lecturer (Teaching & Research) in the field of Creative and Cultural Industries at Cardiff University, UK. Her research has a special focus on Human and Cultural Rights, spatial and social justice and participatory arts. She is most interested in theatre and film that either function as tools to address trauma and complex societal issues, or represents them



Museum of Nonhumanity

Author : Laura Gustafsson

Publisher : punctum books

Page : 281 pages

File Size : 34,34 MB

Release : 2019-05-28

Category : Animal rights

ISBN : 1950192113

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Book Description

Museum of Nonhumanity is the catalogue for a full-size touring museum that presents the history of the distinction between humans and animals, and the way that this artificial boundary has been used to oppress human and nonhuman beings over long historical periods. Throughout history, declaring a group to be nonhuman or subhuman has been an effective tool for justifying slavery, oppression, medical experimentation, genocide, and other forms of violence against those deemed "other." Conversely, differentiating humans from other species has paved the way for the abuse of natural resources and other animals. Museum of Nonhumanity approaches animalization as a nexus that connects xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, and the abuse of nature and other animals. The touring museum hosts lecture programs in which local civil rights and animal rights organizations, academics, artists, and activists propose paths to a more inclusive society through intersectional approaches. The museum also hosts a pop-up book shop and a vegan café. As a temporary, utopian institution, Museum of Nonhumanity stands as a monument to the call to make animalization history.



Museum Activism

Author : Robert R. Janes

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 527 pages

File Size : 31,79 MB

Release : 2019-01-10

Category : Art

ISBN : 1351251023

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Book Description

Only a decade ago, the notion that museums, galleries and heritage organisations might engage in activist practice, with explicit intent to act upon inequalities, injustices and environmental crises, was met with scepticism and often derision. Seeking to purposefully bring about social change was viewed by many within and beyond the museum community as inappropriately political and antithetical to fundamental professional values. Today, although the idea remains controversial, the way we think about the roles and responsibilities of museums as knowledge based, social institutions is changing. Museum Activism examines the increasing significance of this activist trend in thinking and practice. At this crucial time in the evolution of museum thinking and practice, this ground-breaking volume brings together more than fifty contributors working across six continents to explore, analyse and critically reflect upon the museum’s relationship to activism. Including contributions from practitioners, artists, activists and researchers, this wide-ranging examination of new and divergent expressions of the inherent power of museums as forces for good, and as activists in civil society, aims to encourage further experimentation and enrich the debate in this nascent and uncertain field of museum practice. Museum Activism elucidates the largely untapped potential for museums as key intellectual and civic resources to address inequalities, injustice and environmental challenges. This makes the book essential reading for scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics. It will be a source of inspiration to museum practitioners and museum leaders around the globe.



Time and the Museum

Author : Jen A. Walklate

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 202 pages

File Size : 48,82 MB

Release : 2022-07-25

Category : Art

ISBN : 1000624196

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Book Description

Time and the Museum: Literature, Phenomenology, and the Production of Radical Temporality, is the first explicit in-depth study of the nature of museum temporality. It argues as its departure point that the way in which museums have hitherto been understood as temporal in the scholarship - as spaces of death, othering, memory, and history – is too simplistic, and has resulted in museum temporality being reduced to a strange heterotopia (Foucault) – something peculiar, and thus black boxed. However, to understand the ways in which museum temporalities and timescapes are produced, and the consequences that these have upon display and visitor response, is crucial, because time is itself a political entity, with ethical consequence. Time and the Museum highlights something we all experience in some way – time – as a key ethical and political feature of the museum space. Utilizing the fields of literature and phenomenology, the book examines how time is experienced and performed in the public areas of three museum spaces within Oxford – the Ashmolean, Pitt Rivers, and Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Using concepts such as shape, structure, form, presence, absence, authenticity, and aura, the book argues for a reconsideration of museum time as something with radical potential and political weight. It will appeal to academics and postgraduate students, especially those engaged in the study of museums, culture, literature, and design.



Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum

Author : Jane Chin Davidson

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 196 pages

File Size : 23,65 MB

Release : 2017-07-20

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1317220803

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Book Description

Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum provides new thinking on exhibitions of global art and world art in relation to university museums. Taking The Fowler Museum at UCLA, USA, as its central subject, this edited collection traces how university museum practices have expanded the understanding of the ‘art object’ in recent years. It is argued that the meaning of cultural objects infused with the heritage and identity of ‘global culture’ has been developed substantially through the innovative approaches of university scholars, museum curators, and administrators since the latter part of the twentieth century. Through exploring the ways in which universities and their museums have overseen changes in the global context for art, this edited collection initiates a larger dialogue and inquiry into the value and contribution of the empirical model. The volume includes a full-colour photo essay by Marla C. Berns on the Fowler Museum’s ‘Fowler at Fifty’ project, as well as contributions from Donald Preziosi, Catherine M. Cole, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Claire Farago, Selma Holo, and Gemma Rodrigues. It is important reading for professionals, scholars and advanced students alike.



Reculturing Museums

Author : Doris B. Ash

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 319 pages

File Size : 28,52 MB

Release : 2022-02-27

Category : Art

ISBN : 1000536173

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Book Description

Reculturing Museums takes a unified sociocultural theoretical approach to analyze the many conflicts museums experience in the 21st century. Embracing conflict, Ash asks: What can practitioners and researchers do to create the change they want to see when old systems remain stubbornly in place? Using a unified sociocultural, cultural-historical, activity-theoretical approach to analyzing historically bound conflicts that plague museums, each chapter is organized around a central contradiction, including finances ("Who will pay for museums?"), demographic shifts ("Who will come to museums?"), the roles of narratives ("Whose story is it?"), ownership of objects ("Who owns the artifact?"), and learning and teaching ("What is learning and how can we teach equitably?"). The reculturing stance taken by Ash promotes social justice and equity, ‘making change’ first, within museums, called inreach, rather than outside the museum, called outreach; challenges existing norms; is sensitive to neoliberal and deficit ideologies; and pays attention to the structure agency dialectic. Reculturing Museums will be essential reading for academics, students, museum practitioners, educational researchers, and others who care about museums and want to ensure that all people have equal access to the activities, objects, and ideas residing in them.



Beyond Pedagogy

Author : Brenda Trofanenko

Publisher : Springer

Page : 177 pages

File Size : 44,77 MB

Release : 2014-07-11

Category : Education

ISBN : 9462096325

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Book Description

Beyond Pedagogy: Reconsidering the public purpose of museums explores issues standing at the intersection of public pedagogy, memory, and critical theory, focusing on the explicit and implicit educational imperative of art, natural history, and indigenous museums, cultural centers, memorial sites, heritage houses, and other cultural heritage sites that comprise the milieu of educating, learning, and knowing. Taken together, the various essays comprising this book demonstrate that a more nuanced examination of the role of cultural heritage institutions as pedagogical sites requires a critical gaze to understand the function of the authority and ways through which such institutions educate. Beyond Pedagogy also makes a vital point about the complexity of such institutions and the need to comprehend how pedagogy emerges not only as an end result of the museum’s educational purpose but also in relation to the historically defined mandates that increasingly come to question the distinction between the knowledge we know and how we come to know it. As such, this volume expands our understandings of the ways in which pedagogy operates in the contexts of museums and heritage sites and the forms of knowledge, knowing, and being it conjures, celebrates, obscures, and/or silences in the process of producing among museum visitors particular notions of identity, subjectivity and voice, ones that, more often than not, reify rather than challenge traditional conceptualizations of the nation and its past, present, and future.



The Performance of Viking Identity in Museums

Author : Guðrún D. Whitehead

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 200 pages

File Size : 32,30 MB

Release : 2024-08-12

Category : Art

ISBN : 1351036009

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Book Description

The Performance of Viking Identity in Museums explores the representations and uses of Vikings in museums across Iceland, British Isles and Norway. Drawing on theories from history, philosophy, museology, and sociology, the book analyses how the Viking myth is used by visitors to make sense of present-day society, culture, and politics and the role of museums in this meaning-making process. Demonstrating that the Viking myth is present in collective memory and plays an important role in the construction and modification of collective, national, and personal identities, the book analyses this process through the framework of museums and their visitors. Identifying museums as places where heritage, identity and social norms are affirmed and reflected upon, Whitehead demonstrates that all countries use their Viking heritage to define their identity on a local and international level - through tourist attractions such as museums and other Viking-related monuments and merchandise. Providing readers with an insight into Vikings and their social relevance today, The Performance of Viking Identity in Museums will be of great interest to academics and researchers across the social and human sciences. It should also be essential reading for museum professionals working in museums around the world.



Analysing Museum Display

Author : Christopher Whitehead

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 279 pages

File Size : 23,56 MB

Release : 2024-09-30

Category : Art

ISBN : 1351001620

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Book Description

Analysing Museum Display is the first comprehensive book to bring together approaches to studying museum displays. Drawing on global examples, it reviews different theoretical frameworks and methods, charting major contributions to the field and exploring their potentials and limitations. How and why should we study museum display, and what is its nature as a complex form of representation? The book argues that display is at once material, experiential, and political in producing knowledge and that analysis requires rigorous conceptualisation and careful methodologies. It provides a critical guide to existing concepts and methods, exploring how museum display can be understood using semiotic, narrative, cartographic, and spatial analyses, assemblage theory, new materialist and multisensory approaches, and theories of affect, emotion, and historical positioning. Alongside this, Whitehead presents key orientations for research practice relating to objectivity and subjectivity, historical and contextual awareness, and mixing methods. Analysing Museum Display will be essential reading for scholars and students of museology at all levels. The book will also appeal to museum curators and professionals who are involved in the production of displays and wish to develop a more theorised and reflective perspective on their own practice.



Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today

Author : Joni Boyd Acuff

Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield

Page : 381 pages

File Size : 47,58 MB

Release : 2014-07-08

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN : 0759124116

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Book Description

Aimed at museum educators, Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today seeks to marry museum and multicultural education theories. It reveals how the union of these theories yields more equitable educational practices and guides museum educators to address misrepresentation, exclusivity, accessibility, and educational inequality. This contemporary text is directive; it encourages museum educators to consider the critical multicultural education theoretical framework in their day-to-day functions in order to illuminate and combat shortcomings at the crux of museum education: Museum Educators as Change Agents Inclusion versus Exclusion Collaboration with Diverse Audiences Responsive Pedagogy This book adopts a broad definition of multiculturalism, which names not only race and ethnicity as concerns, but also gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, age, and class. While focusing on these various facets of identity, the authors demonstrate how museums are social systems that should offer comprehensive, diverse educational experiences not only through exhibitions but through other educational activities. The authors pull from their own research and practical experiences which exemplify how museums have been and can be attentive to these areas of identity. Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today is hopeful and inspiring, as it identifies and commends the positive and effective practices that some museum educators have enacted in an effort to be inclusive. Museum educators are at the front-line interacting with the public on a daily basis. Thus, these educators can be the real vanguard of change, modeling critical multicultural behavior and practices.