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Mapping a New Museum seeks to rethink the museum’s role in today’s politically conscious world. Presenting a selection of innovative projects that have taken place in Latin America over the last year, the book begins to map out possibilities for the future of the global museum. The projects featured within the pages of this book were all supported by The Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research (SDCELAR) at the British Museum (BM), with the aim of making the BM’s Latin American collections meaningful to communities in the region and others worldwide. These projects illustrate how communities manage cultural heritage and, taken together, they suggest that there is ...
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...
Since the late nineteenth century, museums have been cited as tools of imperialism and colonialism, as strongholds of patriarchalism, masculinism, homophobia and xenophobia, and accused both of elitism and commercialism. But, could the museum absorb and benefit from its critique, turning into a critical museum, into the site of resistance rather than ritual? This book looks at the ways in which the museum could use its collections, its cultural authority, its auratic space and resources to give voice to the underprivileged, and to take an active part in contemporary and at times controversial issues. Drawing together both major museum professionals and academics, it examines the theoretical concept of the critical museum, and uses case studies of engaged art institutions from different parts of the world. It reaches beyond the usual focus on western Europe, America, and ’the World’, including voices from, as well as about, eastern European museums, which have rarely been discussed in museum studies books so far.
Museum Worlds: Advances in Research' is a new, multidisciplinary, refereed, annual journal from Berghahn Journals that will publish work that significantly advances knowledge of global trends, case studies and theory relevant to museum practice and scholarship around the world. It aims to trace and comment on major regional, theoretical, methodological and topical themes and debates, and encourage comparison of museum theories, practices, and developments in different global settings. Each issue includes a conversation piece on a current topic, as well as peer reviewed scholarly articles and review articles, book and exhibition reviews, and news on developments in museum studies and related curricula in different parts of the world. Drawing on the expertise and networks of a global Editorial Board of senior scholars and museum practitioners, the journal will both challenge and develop the core concepts that link different disciplinary perspectives on museums by bringing new voices into ongoing debates and discussions.
November 11, 2018, is the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, a time of remembering and memorial, of linking past events to the world we live in today. Taking this particular moment as a catalyst, this book examines the character and relevance of memory more broadly. The essays in this collection ask readers to think creatively and deeply about notions of memory – its composition and practices – and the ways that memory is transmitted, recorded, and distorted through time and space. Memory navigates a broad terrain, with essays drawn from a diverse group of contributors who capture different perspectives on the idea of memory in fields ranging from molecular genetics, astrophysics and engineering, to law, Indigenous oral histories, and the natural world. This book challenges readers to think critically about memory, offering an engaging and interdisciplinary roadmap for exploring how, why, and when we remember.
From the daring Peruvian essayist and provocateur behind Sexographies comes a fierce and funny exploration of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood that delves headlong into our fraught fascination with human reproduction. Women play all the time with the great power that’s been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss. Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or ...
This Handbook provides a transnational reference point for critical engagements with the legacies of, and futures for, global archaeological collections. It challenges the common misconception that museum archaeology is simply a set of procedures for managing and exhibiting assemblages. Instead, this volume advances museum archaeology as an area of reflexive research and practice addressing the critical issues of what gets prioritized by and researched in museums, by whom, how, and why. Through twenty-eight chapters, authors problematize and suggest new ways of thinking about historic, contemporary, and future relationships between archaeological fieldwork and museums, as well as the array o...
Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, past and present. It brings together an impressive array of international scholars and curators from a wide variety of disciplines – including the history of science, museum anthropology and postcolonial history - to consider the mobility of collections. The book combines historical perspectives on the circulation of museum objects in the past with contemporary accounts of their re-mobilisation, notably in the context of Indigenous community engagement. Contributors seek to explore processes of circulation historically in order to re-examine, inform and unsettle common assumptions abou...
This highly original case study, which adopts a material culture perspective, is unprecedented in social and cultural histories of the Soviet period and provides a unique window on social relations. The author demonstrates how Moisei Ginzburg's Constructivist masterpiece, the Narkomfin Communal House, employed classic Marxist understandings of material culture in an effort to overturn capitalist and patriarchal social structures. Through the edifying effects of architectural forms, Ginzburg attempted to induce socialist and feminist-inspired social and gender relations. The author shows how, for the inhabitants, these principles manifested themselves, from taste to hygiene to gender roles, and how individuals variously appropriated architectural space and material culture to cope with the conditions of daily life, from the utopianism of the First Five Year Plan and Stalin's purges to the collapse of the Soviet Union. This book makes a major contribution to: the history of socialism in the Soviet Union and, more generally, Eastern Europe; material culture studies; architectural history; archaeology and social anthropology.