Museum Studies

Written by a museum professional and based on a course taught for many years, this book is an accessible volume that provides a unique insider’s guide to what museums are and how they operate.

The Companion explores topics such as global developments in contemporary indigenous art, Asian and Chinese art since the 1980s, feminist and queer feminist curatorial practices, and new curatorial strategies beyond the museum. This unique volume: Offers readers a wide range of perspectives on curating in both theory and practice Includes coverage of curation outside of the Eurocentric and Anglosphere art worlds, Presents clear and comprehensible information valuable for specialists and novices alike, Discusses the movements, models, people and politics of curating, Provides guidance on curating in a globalized world, Broad in scope and detailed in content

Drawing from a wide range of experience, the authors propose the simple ideas which should underpin all professional museum training courses. Organised on a modular basis Museum Basics provides a basic guide to `best practice' in every aspect of museum work, from museum organisation, through collections management and conservation, to marketing and security.

This book examines how we can conceive of a ‘postcolonial museum’ in the contemporary epoch of mass migrations, the internet and digital technologies. The authors consider the museum space, practices and institutions in the light of repressed histories, sounds, voices, images, memories, bodies, expression and cultures. Focusing on the transformation of museums as cultural spaces, rather than physical places, is to propose a living archive formed through creation, participation, production and innovation. The aim is to propose a critical assessment of the museum in the light of those transcultural and global migratory movements that challenge the historical and traditional frames of Occidental thought. This involves a search for new strategies and critical approaches in the fields of museum and heritage studies which will renew and extend understandings of European citizenship and result in an inevitable re-evaluation of the concept of ‘modernity’ in a so-called globalised and multicultural world.

Reflections on Critical Museology: Inside and Outside Museums offers a reflective and reflexive re-assessment of museum studies and the first wide-ranging account of critical museology. Drawing on an extensive range of examples from museums and across the museological literature, which are purposefully representative of very different cultural backgrounds, the book issues a plea for critical thinking in and about museums. The various institutions covered and the plural analytical standpoints offer a broad interdisciplinary approach by intermingling art history, anthropology, sociocultural theories and heritage studies.

Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics is a theoretically informed reconceptualization of museum ethics discourse as a dynamic social practice central to the project of creating change in the museum. Through twenty-seven chapters by an international and interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners it explores contemporary museum ethics as an opportunity for growth, rather than a burden of compliance. The volume represents diverse strands in museum activity from exhibitions to marketing, as ethics is embedded in all areas of the museum sector.

The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication explores what it means to take mediated communication as a key concept for museum studies and as a sensitising lens for media-related museum practice on the ground. Including contributions from experts around the world, this original and innovative Handbook shares a nuanced and precise understanding of media, media concepts and media terminology, rehearsing new locations for writing on museum media and giving voice to new subject alignments. As a whole, the volume breaks new ground by reframing mediated museum communication as a resource for an inclusive understanding of current museum developments.

Places of Pain and Shame is a cross-cultural study of sites that represent painful and/or shameful episodes in a national or local community’s history, and the ways that government agencies, heritage professionals and the communities themselves seek to remember, commemorate and conserve these cases – or, conversely, choose to forget them. Such episodes and locations include: massacre and genocide sites, places related to prisoners of war, civil and political prisons, and places of ‘benevolent’ internment such as leper colonies and lunatic asylums. These sites bring shame upon us now for the cruelty and futility of the events that occurred within them and the ideologies they represented. They are however increasingly being regarded as ‘heritage sites’, a far cry from the view of heritage that prevailed a generation ago when we were almost entirely concerned with protecting the great and beautiful creations of the past, reflections of the creative genius of humanity rather than the reverse – the destructive and cruel side of history. Why has this shift occurred, and what implications does it have for professionals practicing in the heritage field? In what ways is this a ‘difficult’ heritage to deal with?

Indigenous Cultural Centers and Museums: An Illustrated International Survey documents a rich legacy of collaboration across the spatial disciplines combining creative art practice, architecture, construction, landscape design, and urban design in the production of unique and culturally significant social institutions. This book covers a wide range of cultural programs where talented architectural practices have consulted with diverse Indigenous client groups to design for intercultural engagement. It documents the creation stories of these projects from conception to reception.