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Recent Staff Publications
Publications
The Department has an extensive range of publications which can be purchased from the University Bookshop. The Museum Studies catalogue is available free on request.
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National Museums New Studies from Around the World 504 pages National Museums is the first book to explore the national museum as a cultural institution in a range of contrasting national contexts. Composed of new studies of countries that rarely make a showing in the English-language studies of museums, this book reveals how these national museums have been used to create a sense of national self, place the nation in the arts, deal with the consequences of political change, remake difficult pasts, and confront those issues of nationalism, ethnicity and multiculturalism which have come to the fore in national politics in recent decades. National Museums combines research from both leading and new researchers in the fields of history, museum studies, cultural studies, sociology, history of art, media studies, science and technology studies, and anthropology. It is an interrogation of the origins, purpose, organisation, politics, narratives and philosophies of national museums. |
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A Persistent Prejudice, (chapter)
Richard Sandell with Stuart Frost, in Cameron, F. and Kelly, L. (eds) Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums 323 pages Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums engages the highly problematic and increasingly important issue of museums, science centres, their roles in contemporary societies, their engagement with 'hot' topics and their part in wider conversations in a networked public culture. Hot topics such as homosexuality, sexual, and racial violence, massacres, drugs, terrorism, GMO foods, H1M1 (swine flu) and climate change are now all part of museological culture. The authors in this collection situate cultural institutions in an increasingly interconnected, complex, globalising and uncertain world and engage the why and how institutions might form part of, activate conversations and action through discussions that theorise institutions in new ways to the very practical means in which institutions might engage their constituencies. |
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MATERIALISING EXILE Material Culture and Embodied Experience among Karenni Refugees in Thailand Sandra Dudley 220 pages, 14 ills, bibliog., index ISBN 978-1-84545-640-5 Focusing on the highly diverse Karenni refugee population living in camps on the Thai-Burma border, this innovative book explores materiality, embodiment, memory, imagination, and identity among refugees, providing new and important ways of understanding how refugees make sense of experience, self, and other. It examines how and to what ends refugees perceive, represent, manipulate, use as metaphor, and otherwise engage with material objects and spaces, and includes a focus on the real and metaphorical journeys that bring about and perpetuate exile. The combined emphasis on both displacement and materiality, and the analysis of the cultural construction and intersections of exilic objects, spaces, and bodies, are unique in the study of both refugees and material culture. Drawing theoretical influences from phenomenology, aesthetics, and beyond, as well as from refugee studies and anthropology, the author addresses the current lack of theoretical analysis of the material, visual, spatial, and embodied aspects of forced migration, providing a fundamentally interlinked analysis of enforced exile and materiality. |
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Re-Presenting Disability Activism and Agency in the Museum Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Editors) ISBN: 978-0-415-49473-1
Re-Presenting Disability addresses issues surrounding disability representation in museums and galleries, a topic which is receiving much academic attention and is becoming an increasingly pressing issue for practitioners working in wide-ranging museums and related cultural organisations. This volume of provocative and timely contributions, brings together twenty researchers, practitioners and academics from different disciplinary, institutional and cultural contexts to explore issues surrounding the cultural representation of disabled people and, more particularly, the inclusion (as well as the marked absence) of disability-related narratives in museum and gallery displays. The diverse perspectives featured in the book offer fresh ways of interrogating and understanding contemporary representational practices as well as illuminating existing, related debates concerning identity politics, social agency and organisational purposes and responsibilities, which have considerable currency within museums and museum studies. Re-Presenting Disability explores such issues as:
You can read a review of Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency on the Museum on the Disability Arts Online website |
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Museum Materialities Sandra Dudley (Editor) Binding: Hardback (also available in Paperback) Museum Materialities is divided into three sections - Objects, Engagements and Interpretations - and includes a foreword by Susan Pearce and an afterword by Howard Morphy. It examines materiality and other perceptual and ontological qualities of objects themselves; embodied sensory and cognitive engagements – both personal and across a wider audience spread – with particular objects or object types in a museum or gallery setting; notions of aesthetics, affect and wellbeing in museum contexts; and creative and innovative artistic and museum practices that seek to illuminate or critique museum objects and interpretations. Phenomenological and other approaches to embodied experience in an emphatically material world are current in a number of academic areas, most particularly strands of material culture studies within anthropology and cognate disciplines. Thus far, however, there has been no concerted application of this kind of approach to museum collections and interactions with them by museum visitors, curators, artists and researchers. Bringing together essays by scholars and practitioners from a wide disciplinary and international base, Museum Materialities seeks to make just such a contribution. In so doing it makes a valuable and original addition to the literature of both material culture studies and museum studies alike. |
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Learning at the Museum Frontiers Hardcover: 224 pages In the socio-cultural landscape of the twenty-first century the museum has power. It has been seen variously as a sanctuary, a place of knowledge, a forum and a vital player in democracy, but it can also spark bitter controversy as an icon of western colonialism in particular contexts. 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 |
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Valuing Historic Environments By Lisanne Gibson and John Pendlebury (Editors) Hardcover: 200 pages
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Museums and Their Communities (Leicester Readers in Museum Studies) Sheila Watson (Editor) Hardcover: 360 pages |
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Museums in the Material World (Leicester Readers in Museum Studies) by Simon Knell (Editor) Hardcover: 392 pages Museums in the Material World seeks to both introduce classic and thought-provoking pieces and contrast them with articles which reveal grounded practice. The articles are selected from across the full breadth of museum disciplines and are linked by a logical narrative, as detailed in the section introductions. The choice of articles reveals how the debate has opened up on disciplinary practice, how the practices of the past have been critiqued and in some cases replaced, how it has become necessary to look beyond and outside disciplinary boundaries, and how old practices can in many circumstances continue to have validity. "Museums in the Material World" is about broadening horizons and moving museum studies students, and others, beyond the narrow confines of their own disciplinary thinking or indeed any narrow conception of collections. In essence, this is a book about the practice of interpretation and will therefore be of great use to those students and museum practitioners involved in the field of material culture in museums. |
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Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed by Sheila Watson, Suzanne MacLeod, Simon Knell (Editors) Hardcover: 352 pages This single-volume museum studies reference title explores the ways in which museums are shaped and configured and how they themselves attempt to shape and change the world around them. Written by a leading group of museum professionals and academics from around the world and including new research, the chapters reveal the diverse and subtle means by which museums engage and in so doing change and are changed. The authors span over 200 years discussing national museums, ecomuseums, society museums, provincial galleries, colonial museums, the showman's museum, and science centres.Topics covered include: disciplinary practices, ethnic representation, postcolonial politics, economic aspiration, social reform, indigenous models, conceptions of history, urban regeneration, sustainability, sacred objects, a sense of place, globalization, identities, social responsibility, controversy, repatriation, human remains, drama, learning and education. Capturing the richness of the museum studies discipline, Museum Revolutions is the ideal text for museum studies courses, providing a wide range of interlinked themes and the latest thought and research from experts in the field. It is invaluable |
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Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference by Richard Sandell Paperback: 226 pages This book draws on in-depth case studies and a range of international examples on the topical debate surrounding social issues, political challenges, opportunities and responsibilities that accompany a museums framework. Richard Sandell combines interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives with in-depth empirical investigation to address a number of timely questions: How do audiences engage with and respond to exhibitions designed to contest and reconfigure prejudiced conceptions of different social groups? To what extent can museums be understood to shape understandings of difference, acceptability and tolerance? What are the challenges for museums which attempt to engage audiences in debating contemporary social issues and how might these be addressed? This highly original contribution presents the significant role that museums can play in confronting prejudice and cross-cultural understanding through accommodating and engaging differences on the basis of gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality. "Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference" will greatly appeal to practitioners, academics and policy makers on an international scale. |
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Museum Management and Marketing: 1 (Leicester Readers in Museum Studies) by Robert R. Janes, Richard Sandell (Editors)
Paperback: 420 pages Drawing together a selection of high quality, intellectually robust and stimulating articles on both theoretical and practice-based developments in the field, this Reader investigates the closely linked areas of management and marketing in the museum. The articles, from established and world-renowned contributors, practitioners and writers at the leading edge of their fields, deal with the museum context of management and how marketing and management practices must take account of the specifics of the museum and the not-for-profit ethos. Key writings from broader literature are included, and the collection of key writings on the investigation and study of management and marketing in the museum are of great benefit not only to those studying the subject, but also to professionals working and developing within the field. |
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Museums and Education: Purpose, Pedagogy, Performance (Museum Meanings) by Eilean Hooper Greenhill Paperback: 256 pages Publisher: Routledge (1 Sep 2007) At the beginning of the 21st century museums are challenged on a number of fronts. The prioritisation of learning in museums in the context of demands for social justice and cultural democracy combined with cultural policy based on economic rationalism forces museums to review their educational purposes, redesign their pedagogies and account for their performance. The need to theorise learning and culture for a cultural theory of learning is very pressing.If culture acts as a process of signification, a means of producing meaning that shapes worldviews, learning in museums and other cultural organisations is potentially dynamic and profound, producing self-identities. How is this complexity to be 'measured'? What can this 'measurement' reveal about the character of museum-based learning? The calibration of culture is an international phenomenon, and the measurement of the outcomes and impact of learning in museums in England has provided a detailed case study. Three national evaluation studies were carried out between 2003 and 2006 based on the conceptual framework of Generic Learning Outcomes. Using this revealing data "Museums and Education" reveals the power of museum pedagogy and as it doesw, questions are raised about traditional museum culture and the potential and challenge for museums is suggested. |
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Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (Museum Meanings) (Hardcover) by Ross Parry Hardcover: 192 pages "Recoding the Museum" is a cultural reading of how 'new media' has coded the practices, aspirations and perceptions of the modern museum. Through an historical approach, Ross Parry excavates cultural assumptions and values that provide the basis of museum information management and display, and that are still used to this day. The book analyzes topics such as digitization techniques, database management, virtual reality and hypermedia.Parry resists models of technological determinism, passive media, and the notions of the museum as a constant institution transmitting knowledge, and instead predicates : that communication technologies are as formed (as they inform) society; that new media as a cultural product is an active contributor to any message it transmits; and that museums themselves are an adaptive medium that tend to be part of dynamic interactions with a diverse and active audience. For students and professionals in the field, this is a hugely interesting and enlightening book full of ideas and arguments to make you think. |
