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What if museum critics were challenged to envision their own exhibitions? In Curatorial Dreams, fourteen authors from disciplines throughout the social sciences and humanities propose exhibitions inspired by their research and critical concerns to creatively put theory into practice. Pushing the boundaries of museology, this collection gives rare insight into the process of conceptualizing exhibitions. The contributors offer concrete, innovative projects, each designed for a specific setting in which to translate critical academic theory about society, culture, and history into accessible imagined exhibitions. Spanning Australia, Barbados, Canada, Chile, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States, the exhibitions are staged in museums, scientific institutions, art galleries, and everyday sites. Essays explore political and practical constraints, imaginative freedom, and experiment with critical, participatory, and socially relevant exhibition design. While the deconstructive critique of museums remains relevant, Curatorial Dreams charts new ground, proposing unique modes of engagement that enrich public scholarship and dialogue.
The controversy surrounding the significant "Into the Heart of Africa" exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada is explored in this compelling and analytical text. The exhibit has become an international, controversial touchstone for issues surrounding the politics of visual representation, such as the challenges to curatorial and ethnographic authority in multicultural and postcolonial contexts. Asking why the museum's exhibit failed so many people, the author examines such issues as institutional politics, the broad political and intellectual climate surrounding museums, the legacies of colonialism and traditions of representation of Africa, and the politics of irony. By drawing upon anthropological and cultural criticism, the book offers a unique account of the ways in which an ambiguous exhibit about colonialism became the site of an expansiveInto the Heart of Africa."
Of all mankinds' vices, racism is one of the most pervasive and stubborn. Success in overcoming racism has been achieved from time to time, but victories have been limited thus far because mankind has focused on personal economic gain or power grabs ignoring generosity of the soul. This bibliography brings together the literature.
Twenty-four news networks, a plethora of newspapers and magazines, vibrant news-talk radio, and the ubiquitous Internet highlight our society as information-driven. With such a steady stream of hard facts mixed with publicised opinions, the mainstream population has an opinion on everything. Most anyone seems itching to argue their side of an issue, making once private beliefs fodder for general consumption. A staple of any medium's content is a regular public opinion poll on whatever hot topic strikes the editor's fancy. From the significant to the mundane, public opinion permeates society. Accordingly, politicians have taken note of these opinions and adopted stands and values that put them in tune with public sentiment. An understanding of the nature of public opinion, therefore, is paramount in today's world. This book assembles and presents a carefully chosen bibliography on public opinion in its many forms. The collection of references makes for a valuable resource in studying and researching the critical issue of public opinion. Easy access to these pieces of literature are then provided with author, title, and subject indexes.
Tracing the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture, this collection reveals complex stories of individual and collective struggles to survive.
This collection of original essays brings together museum, theatre, and performance case studies with a focus on their distinctive and overlapping modes of producing memory for transnational audiences. Whether this is through narrative, object, embodied encounter or a combination of the three, this volume considers distinctions and interactions between memory and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies. This book is underpinned by three areas of research enquiry: How are contemporary theatre makers and museum curators staging historical narratives of difficult pasts? How might comparisons between theatre and m...
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.
This multidisciplinary collection is unique both in its conceptual and empirical breadth.
How immersive simulations--from a fictional border-crossing site to a mock terrorist training camp--attempt to foster understanding across cultures
The ways in which Aboriginal people and museums work together have changed drastically in recent decades. This historic process of decolonization, including distinctive attempts to institutionalize multiculturalism, has pushed Canadian museums to pioneer new practices that can accommodate both difference and inclusivity. 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 ...