This study focuses on objects and meaning in the museum. How do museum visitors interpret the collections they see on display and how are these interpretations influenced by the pedagogic approach taken by the museum? Questions about the character of visual narratives, cultural difference and the construction of identities present the museum as part of cultural politics. A new museum idea - the post-museum - is about to transform the familiar modernist museum. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill explores specific objects and collections in detail: the founding collections at the National Portrait...

Over the last 20 years, museum professionals have become increasingly aware of the educational role of museums and have begun to re-evaluate the relationship between museums and their visitors. Museum visits tend to be brief, infrequent events requiring less time and effort than most educational activities. Can adults and children alike learn anything from such fleeting exposure, let alone find the experience profound and meaningful? This text confronts these issues and shows how research in visitor studies and the philosophy of education can be applied to facilitate a meaningful educational...

Drawing together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, Colonialism and the Object explores the impact of colonial contact with other cultures on the material culture of both the colonized and the imperial nation.

The book includes intensive case-studies of objects from India, Pakistan, New Zealand, China and Africa, all of which were collected by, or exhibited in, the institutions of the British Empire, and key chapters address issues of radical identity across cultural barriers, and the hybird styles of objects which...

This text explores how evolutionary museums developed in the USA, UK and Australia in the late 19th century. This historical investigation also contributes to current debates, both on relationships between culture and the social, and to the rapidly changing practices of modern museums.

Using examples of indigenous models from Indonesia, the Pacific, Africa and Native North America, Kreps illustrates how concepts of cultural heritage preservation and indigenous curation is transforming conventional museum practice.

Museums, Society, Inequality explores the wide-ranging social roles and responsibilities of the museum. It brings together diverse perspectives from across the globe (including Australia, South Africa, Canada, Greece, the USA and the UK) which collectively seek to stimulate critical debate, to inform the work of practictioners and policy makers and to advance recognition of the agency of museums; their purpose, responsibilities and value to society. The notion that the cultural and the social are inextricably linked and more particularly, that museums have the potential to act as agents of...

Reshaping Museum Space pulls together the views of an international group of museum professionals, architects, designers and academics highlights the complexity, significance and malleability of museum space, and provides reflections upon recent developments in museum architecture and exhibition design.

Various chapters concentrate on the process of architectural and spatial reshaping, and the problems of navigating the often contradictory agendas and aspirations of the broad range of professionals and stakeholders involved in any new project.

Contributors review...

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 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...

Museums and Social Activism is the first study to bring together historical accounts of the African American and later American Indian civil rights-related social and reform movements that took place on the Smithsonian Mall through the 1960s and 1970s in Washington DC with the significant but unknown story about museological transformation and curatorial activism that occurred in the Division of Political and Reform History at the National Museum of American History at this time. Based on interdisciplinary field-based research that has brought together cross-cultural and international...