You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
With contributions from key scholars in a range of disciplines, this engaging new volume explores the complex issues surrounding collaboration between museums and their communities.
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 ...
In Learning at the Museum Frontiers, Viv Golding argues that the museum has the potential to function as a frontier – a zone where learning is created, new identities are forged and new connections made between disparate groups and their own histories. She draws on a range of theoretical perspectives including Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, Foucauldian discourse on space and power, and postcolonial and Black feminist theory, as well as her own professional experience in museum education over a ten-year period, applying these ideas to a wide range of museum contexts. The book offers an important theoretical and empirical contribution to the debate on the value of museums and what they can contribute to society. The author reveals the radical potential for museums to tackle injustice and social exclusion, challenge racism, enhance knowledge and promote truth.
In Learning at the Museum Frontiers, Viv Golding argues that the museum has the potential to function as a frontier - a zone where learning is created, new identities are forged and new connections made between disparate groups and their own histories. She draws on a range of theoretical perspectives including Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, Foucauldian discourse on space and power, and postcolonial and Black feminist theory, as well as her own professional experience in museum education over a ten-year period, applying these ideas to a wide range of museum contexts. The book offers an important theoretical and empirical contribution to the debate on the value of museums and what they can contribute to society. The author reveals the radical potential for museums to tackle injustice and social exclusion, challenge racism, enhance knowledge and promote truth.
Museums are usually seen as arenas for the authorised presentations of reality, based on serious, professional knowledge. Yet, in spite of the impossibility of giving anything but a highly abstract and extremely selective impression in an exhibition, very few museums problematize this or discuss their priorities with their public. They don’t ask “what are the other truths of the matter?” Though the essays in this collection are not written with museums and truth as their explicit subject, they highlight contested truths, the absence of the truth of the underprivileged, whether one truth is more worthy than the other, and whether lesser truths can dilute the value of greater truths. One...
This volume presents sixteen thoughtful essays which address innovative ways to present cultural heritage primarily in ethnographic and social history museums through recent permanent, temporary, and mobile exhibitions. The essays included are taken from the different vantage points; they prompt critical debate about new ways of thinking and working in museums of different sizes, with regard for how we might work collaboratively towards a more equitable future. Essential political issues related to power and the strong influences of the museum are addressed in each section, especially with regards to the presentation of particular cultures and communities.
In Learning at the Museum Frontiers, Viv Golding argues that the museum has the potential to function as a frontier, to tackle injustice and social exclusion, challenge racism, enhance knowledge and promote truth. The book offers an important theoretical and empirical contribution to the debate on the value of museums and what they can contribute to society.
This volume presents seventeen essays critically reflecting on the collaborative work of the contemporary ethnographic museum with diverse communities. It invites the reader to think about the roles and values of museums internationally, particularly the wide range of creative approaches that can progress dialogue and intercultural understanding in an age of migration that is marked by division and distrust. Against a troubling global background of prejudice and misunderstanding, where elections are increasingly returning right-wing governments, this timely book considers the power of an inclusive and transformative museum space, specifically the movements from static sites where knowledge is transmitted to passive audiences towards potential contact zones where diverse community voices and visibilities are raised and new knowledge(s) actively constructed.
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.
This book takes a new, exciting and important approach to art. It shows how children and older students can use art to explore personal, social and cultural issues that touch their lives. The book covers new ground, responding as it does to the increasingly diverse nature of cities and to recent government initiatives worldwide to foster social inclusion and equality of opportunity and support active citizenship. The contributors are art educators. They write about their ways of engaging with contemporary art practice in their particular fields so as to encourage young people to acquire critical understanding. They also challenge the pedagogies that perpetuate long-established forms of art p...