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 Making History in a Diverse Europe Simon Knell, Sheila Watson and Andrew Sawyer, et al 65 pages This is the summary policy report of the Eunamus project. Drawing together findings from all of the other project reports and conferences, it reflects upon the way histories are constructed and deployed in Europe’s national museums. It sets out to address two questions: In what ways do national museums, and the histories they display, contribute to social division and cohesion? How might national museums be a force for greater social cohesion in Europe in the future? The report discusses how national museums perform, interpret and narrate meaningful pasts and how these acts of communication are perceived by visitors and citizens. |
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Crossing Borders: Connecting European Identities in Museums and Online Simon Knell, Sheila Watson and Andrew Sawyer, et al 107 pages ISSN 1650-9625 This publication is produced within the three-year research programme EuNaMus – European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, coordinated at Tema Q at Linköping University (www.eunamus.eu). EuNaMus explores the creation and power of the heritage created and presented by European national museums to the world, Europe and its states, as an unsurpassable institution in contemporary society. National museums are defined and explored as processes of institutionalized negotiations where material collections and displays make claims and are recognized as articulating and representing national values and realities. Questions asked in the project are why, by whom, when, with what material, with what result and future possibilities are this museums shaped. |
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The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal Simon Knell 440 pages Stephen Jay Gould borrowed from Winston Churchill when he described the conodont animal as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” This animal confounded science for more than a century. Some thought it a slug, others a fish, a worm, a plant, even a primitive ancestor of ourselves. The list of possibilities grew and yet an answer to the riddle never seemed any nearer. Would the animal that left behind these miniscule fossils known as conodonts ever be identified? Three times the animal was “found,” but each was quite a different animal. Were any of them really the one? Simon J. Knell takes the reader on a journey through 150 years of scientific thinking, imagining, and arguing. Slowly the animal begins to reveal traces of itself: its lifestyle, its remarkable evolution, its witnessing of great catastrophes, its movements over the surface of the planet, and finally its anatomy. Today the conodont animal remains perhaps the most disputed creature in the zoological world. |
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Museum Objects Sandra H. Dudley (ed) 400 pages Museum Objects provides a set of readings that together create a distinctive emphasis and perspective on the objects which lie at the heart of interpretive practice in museums, material culture studies and everyday life. This reader brings together classic and up to date texts on the nature and definition of the object itself, the senses and embodied experience of objects. No other volume brings together such perspectives in this way, and no other volume includes such a focus on the museum context. Museum Objects incorporates both theorised and more practical readings from a range of international academic and contextual perspectives. The overall result is a definitive set of readings that offers a comprehensive understanding of objects and their place within the museum context. |
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Museums, Equality and Social Justice Richard Sandell, Eithne Nightingale (eds) 344 pages 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. |
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Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions Suzanne Macleod, Laura Hourston Hanks, Jonathan Hale (eds) 360 pages Over recent decades, many museums, galleries and historic sites around the world have enjoyed an unprecedented level of large-scale investment in their capital infrastructure, in building refurbishments and new gallery displays. This period has also seen the creation of countless new purpose-built museums and galleries, suggesting a fundamental re-evaluation of the processes of designing and shaping of museums. Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions examines this re-making by exploring the inherently spatial character of narrative in the museum and its potential to connect on the deepest levels with human perception and imagination. Through this uniting theme, the chapters explore the power of narratives as structured experiences unfolding in space and time as well as the use of theatre, film and other technologies of storytelling by contemporary museum makers to generate meaningful and, it is argued here, highly effective and affective museum spaces. Contributions by an internationally diverse group of museum and heritage professionals, exhibition designers, architects and artists with academics from a range of disciplines including museum studies, theatre studies, architecture, design and history cut across traditional boundaries including the historical and the contemporary and together explore the various roles and functions of narrative as a mechanism for the creation of engaging and meaningful interpretive environments. Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions details |
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Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories Sandra H. Dudley, Amy Jane Barnes, Jennifer Binnie, Julia Petrov, Jennifer Walklate (eds) 304 pages Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories is a wide-ranging collection of essays exploring the stories that can be told by and about objects and those who choose to collect them. Examining objects and collecting in different historical, social and institutional contexts, an international, interdisciplinary group of authors consider the meanings and values with which objects are imputed and the processes and implications of collecting. This includes considering the entanglement of objects and collectors in webs of social relations, value and change, object biographies and the sometimes conflicting stories that things come to represent, and the strategies used to reconstruct and retell the narratives of objects. The book includes considerations of individual and groups of objects, such as domestic interiors, novelty tea-pots, Scottish stone monuments, African ironworking, a postcolonial painting and memorials to those killed on the roads in Australia. It also contains chapters dealing with particular collectors – including Charles Bell and Beatrix Potter – and representational techniques. |
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New Directions in Museum Ethics Janet C. Marstine, Alexander Bauer, Chelsea Haines (eds) 152 pages New Directions in Museum Ethics considers key ethical questions in museum policy and practice, particularly those related to issues of collection and display. What does a collection signify in the twenty-first century museum? How does an engagement with immateriality challenge museums’ concept of ownership, and how does that immateriality translate into the design of exhibitions and museum space? Are museums still about safeguarding objects, and what does safeguarding mean for diverse individuals and communities today? How does the notion of the museum as a performative space challenge our perceptions of the object? The scholarship represented in this volume is a testament to the range and significance of critical inquiry in museum ethics. Together, the chapters resist a legalistic interpretation, bound by codes and common practice, to advance an ethics discourse that is richly theorized, constantly changing and contingent on diverse external factors. Contributors take stock of innovative research to articulate a new museum ethics founded on the moral agency of museums, the concept that museums have both the capacity and the responsibility to create social change. This book is based on a special issue of Museum Management and Curatorship. |
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The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics Janet Marstine (ed) 486 pages 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. What the contributions share is an understanding of the contingent nature of museum ethics in the twenty-first century—its relations with complex economic, social, political and technological forces and its fluid ever-shifting sensibility. The volume examines contemporary museum ethics through the prism of those disciplines and methods that have shaped it most. It argues for a museum ethics discourse defined by social responsibility, radical transparency and shared guardianship of heritage. And it demonstrates the moral agency of museums: the concept that museum ethics is more than the personal and professional ethics of individuals and concerns the capacity of institutions to generate self-reflective and activist practice. |
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The Thing about Museums Sandra Dudley, Amy Jane Barnes, Jennifer Binnie, Julia Petrov, Jennifer Walklate (eds) 396 pages The Things about Museums constitutes a unique, highly diverse collection of essays unprecedented in existing books in either museum and heritage studies or material culture studies. Taking varied perspectives and presenting a range of case studies, the chapters all address objects in the context of museums, galleries and/or the heritage sector more broadly. Specifically, the book deals with how objects are constructed in museums, the ways in which visitors may directly experience those objects, how objects are utilised within particular representational strategies and forms, and the challenges and opportunities presented by using objects to communicate difficult and contested matters. Topics and approaches examined in the book are diverse, but include the objectification of natural history specimens and museum registers; materiality, immateriality, transience and absence; subject/object boundaries; sensory, phenomenological perspectives; the museumisation of objects and collections; and the dangers inherent in assuming that objects, interpretation and heritage are ‘good’ for us. |
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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 This volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars to discuss frameworks of value in relation to the preservation of historic environments. Starting from the premise that heritage values are culturally and historically constructed, the book examines the effects of pluralist frameworks of value on how preservation is conceived. It questions the social and economic consequences of constructions of value and how to balance a responsive, democratic conception of heritage with the pressure to deliver on social and economic objectives. It also describes the practicalities of managing the uncertainty and fluidity of the widely varying conceptions of heritage. |
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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 Simon Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, Sheila Watson (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. |
