Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. ...InDecolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the complexities of these new relationships with an eye toward exploring how museums can grapple with centuries of unresolved trauma as they tell the stories of Native peoples. She investigates how museums can honor an Indigenous worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypical representations, and speak the hard truths of colonization within exhibition spaces to address the persistent legacies of historical unresolved grief in Native communities.Lonetree focuses on the representation of Native Americans in exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Minnesota, and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan. Drawing on her experiences as an Indigenous scholar and museum professional, Lonetree analyzes exhibition texts and images, records of exhibition development, and interviews with staff members. She addresses historical and contemporary museum practices and charts possible paths for the future curation and presentation of Native lifeways.
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.
The influence of digital media on the cultural heritage sector has been pervasive and profound. Today museums are reliant on new technology to manage their collections. They collect digital as well ...as material things. New media is embedded within their exhibition spaces. And their activity online is as important as their physical presence on site.
However, 'digital heritage' (as an area of practice and as a subject of study) does not exist in one single place. Its evidence base is complex, diverse and distributed, and its content is available through multiple channels, on varied media, in myriad locations, and different genres of writing.
It is this diaspora of material and practice that this Reader is intended to address. With over forty chapters (by some fifty authors and co-authors), from around the world, spanning over twenty years of museum practice and research, this volume acts as an aggregator drawing selectively from a notoriously distributed network of content. Divided into seven parts (on information, space, access, interpretation, objects, production and futures), the book presents a series of cross-sections through the body of digital heritage literature, each revealing how a different aspect of curatorship and museum provision has been informed, shaped or challenged by computing.
Museums in a Digital Age is a provocative and inspiring guide for any student or practitioner of digital heritage.
Museums are at a critical moment in their history. In order to ensure survival into the next century, museums and galleries must demonstrate their social relevance and use. This means developing ...their public service functions through becoming more knowledgeable about the needs of their visitors and more adept at providing enjoyable and worthwhile experiences.Museums and Their Visitors aims to help museums and galleries in this crucial task. It examines the ways in which museums need to develop their communicative functions and, with examples of case-studies, explains how to achieve best practice. The special needs of a number of target audiences including schools, families and people with disabilities are outlined and illustrated by examples of exhibition, education and marketing policies. The book looks in detail at the power of objects to inspire and stimulate and analyses the use of language in museums and galleries.This is the first book to be written to guide museum and gallery staff in the development of provision for their visitors. It will be of interest to students of museum, heritage and leisure and tourism studies, as well as to international museum professionals.
Design Objects and the Museum brings together leading design historians, curators, educators and archivists to consider the place of contemporary design objects within museums. Contributors draw on a ...wide range of 20th century and contemporary examples from international museums to consider how design objects have been curated and displayed within and beyond the museum. The book continues contemporary global debates on the ways in which museums of design engage and educate their public. Chapters are grouped into three thematic sections addressing The Canon and Design in the Museum; Positioning Design within and Beyond the Museum; and Interpretation and the Challenge of Design, with chapters exploring museological practice and issues, the roles people play in creating meaning, and the challenges contemporary design presents to interpretation and learning within the museum.
Museums may not seem at first glance to be engaged in social work. Yet, Lois H. Silverman brings together here relevant visitor studies, trends in international practice, and compelling examples that ...demonstrate how museums everywhere are using their unique resources to benefit human relationships and, ultimately, to repair the world. In this groundbreaking book, Silverman forges a framework of key social work perspectives to show how museums are evolving a needs-based approach to provide what promises to be universal social service. In partnership with social workers, social agencies, and clients, museums are helping people cope and even thrive in circumstances ranging from personal challenges to social injustices. The Social Work of Museums provides the first integrative survey of this emerging interdisciplinary practice and an essential foundation on which to build for the future.
The Social Work of Museums is not only a vital and visionary resource for museum training and practice in the 21 st century, but also an invaluable tool for social workers, creative arts therapists, and students seeking to broaden their horizons. It will inspire and empower policymakers, directors, clinicians, and evaluators alike to work together toward museums for the next age.
'Silverman provides an informative, readable, and entertaining addition to any museum studies library.' – Visitor Studies 'Timely and important ... so well researched and carefully argued that it is bound to become a classic reference for those who wish to maximize the public value of museums ... The Social Work of Museums is an invaluable resource – one that is well worth owning and returning to again and again ... Lois Silverman has written a brilliant book.' – Mary Ellen Munley, MEM & Associates, Museum Management and Curatorship
'A sympathetic call to action. Silverman artfully weaves together a number of seemingly disparate threads ... The resulting tapestry is a reader-friendly introduction to social work principles for museum professionals … which is simultaneously an introduction to museum studies for social workers. … This is a thought-provoking, inspiring book that many are sure to find is a useful tool for professional development, organizational change, teaching, research, and planning.' – Phaedra Livingstone, University of Oregon, USA, caa.reviews
1. In the Service of Society 2. Social Work Perspectives 3. From Body to Soul 4. Solve et Coagula 5. Treasures of Home 6. Birds in Flight 7. Toward the Next Age
The first book to take a "visitor's eye view" of the museum visit when it was first published in 1992, The Museum Experience revolutionized the way museum professionals understand their constituents. ...Falk and Dierking have updated this essential reference, incorporating advances in research, theory, and practice in the museum field over the last twenty years. Written in clear, non-technical style, The Museum Experience Revisited paints a thorough picture of why people go to museums, what they do there, how they learn, and what museum practitioners can do to enhance these experiences.
The last two decades have seen concerns for equality, diversity, social justice and human rights move from the margins of museum thinking and practice, to the core. The arguments – both moral and ...pragmatic – for engaging diverse audiences, creating the conditions for more equitable access to museum resources, and opening up opportunities for participation, now enjoy considerable consensus in many parts of the world. A growing number of institutions are concerned to construct new narratives that represent a plurality of lived experiences, histories and identities which aim to nurture support for more progressive, ethically-informed ways of seeing and to actively inform contemporary public debates on often contested rights-related issues. At the same time it would be misleading to suggest an even and uncontested transition from the museum as an organisation that has been widely understood to marginalise, exclude and oppress to one which is wholly inclusive. Moreover, there are signs that momentum towards making museums more inclusive and equitable is slowing down or, in some contexts, reversing. Museums, Equality and Social Justice aims to reflect on and, crucially, to inform debates in museum research, policy and practice at this critical time. It brings together new research from academics and practitioners and insights from artists, activists, and commentators to explore the ways in which museums, galleries and heritage organisations are engaging with the fast-changing equalities terrain and the shifting politics of identity at global, national and local levels and to investigate their potential to contribute to more equitable, fair and just societies.
Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global ...examination of the form: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world emerging from widely divergent forms of political violence.
PDF