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Museums in Ukraine’s Donbas region have endured a protracted war since 2014: many were occupied, looted, and re-established in Ukrainian governmentcontrolled territory, leaving behind collections. Against the backdrop of the events of 2014, this paper offers a brief analysis of how museums attempted to safeguard and evacuate their collections when Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Identifying key factors behind the widespread lack of successful evacuations, the paper touches on the social and financial cost of contingency planning, the distribution of responsibilities and resources, institutional bottlenecks, and altered perceptions of risk in war-affected areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary world of social change, accelerated mobility and plural identities, the creation of open and inclusive environments seems to be a recurrent aim at all levels from cities to buildings and to museums in particular. Through the first-hand study and analysis of current case studies, the paper will argue that museums engage space to express the contemporary museological concepts of accessibility, openness and inclusiveness, and through these to engage visitors in cross cultural informational experiences and social encounters. The spatial nature of the contemporary museum, it is proposed, points to a new concept of the museum, which often aims to be part of the city, both in the sense of how it connects to it and in being internally more like a city, and so a continuation of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a brief preliminary examination of lessons learned by the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) initiative through its first year of work from March 2022 through March 2023. I will discuss the foundation of our work by grounding it in the importance of Ukraine’s cultural heritage before outlining the initiative’s efforts to web-archive Ukrainian cultural heritage websites, fundraise for Ukrainian cultural heritage organizations, and develop educational materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extraordinary and brave work of Ukrainian museum workers to protect collections and to continue activities in the face of war exemplifies the possibilities for similar institutions in conflict situations. This paper illustrates some of the main activities of Ukrainian museums from the period of the outbreak of war on 24 February 2022 through to August of the same year, focusing especially on exhibitions, educational programmes, and events, both online and on-site. This research is based on thematic and chronological approaches, using data from descriptions of educational projects on museum websites and social media. The article analyzes museum exhibitions on Russian aggression as well as museum programmes more broadly. The organization of online and offline museum events, projects, excursions, exhibitions, classes for children and refugees, museum workers’ meetings on Museum Day (May 2022), the opening of a new museum, actions in support of the armed forces of Ukraine, and volunteer activities of museum workers in Ukraine are briefly presented. While this article can touch on these broad and diverse topics only briefly, it underlines the value and necessity of further studies focused on the adaptation mechanisms of museums in the challenging conditions of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The improvement of digital technology over recent decades has advanced the ability of museums to manage records of their collections and share them online. However, despite the rise of research in the area of digital heritage, less attention has been given to a sociotechnical perspective on such technology. Drawing upon concepts from Actor-Network Theory, this paper presents actors associated with the V&A's collections management system and its online catalogue. Digital design objects, the museum's new type of collection, are seen as a driving force for change in collections documentation practices. This paper argues for models of documentation to change from closed to open and participatory in order to (re) present such objects' materiality in collection records through the voices of multiple actors. This paper, highlighting the agency of data and technology, increases our awareness of the potential consequences of museums' data practices where the integration of advanced technology (e.g., AI) will be implemented in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the characteristics of born digital objects and how their materiality is framed and transformed in the musealization process. It draws on vibrant materialism and web archiving, framing born digital objects as assemblages and proposing a distinction between these and reborn digital objects, i.e. their collected counterparts. The paper relates this new framing of digital objects to established museological frameworks, such as analyses of the musealization process through the lenses of semiotics and research on authenticity in relation to digital reproductions, in order to unpick the ontological and epistemological transformation this contemporary form of heritage undergoes in entering the museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000, the concept of the Anthropocene has moved from its geologic field of origin into numerous other academic disciplines and into the world of museums. Based on journal papers, exhibition reviews and online material, this paper describes 41 exhibitions about the Anthropocene, analyzes how museums and galleries understand the Anthropocene, and how they use exhibition media as well as their authority as museums in dealing with this topic. It is argued that exhibitions generally display the Anthropocene as an unsettled category. Audiences are presented with complex factual accounts and highly emotional images of the past and the future. They are invited to reflect upon the Anthropocene not as a well-defined issue but as heritage in the sense of 'transformable practices' (Harrison 2015: 34). However, most exhibitions appear to deliberately exclude significant controversies about the Anthropocene and the predicament of the world from their arenas for reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 22 May 2017, a homemade bomb was detonated in the foyer of Manchester Arena as people were leaving an Ariana Grande concert. Twenty-three people (including the bomber) were killed and over 700 were injured. Within hours of the attack, people of Manchester began to leave flowers, candles, soft toys, balloons, written notes and other items in St Ann's Square and other locations around the city. In June 2017, the Manchester City Council tasked Manchester Art Gallery to oversee the removal and collection of material objects from St Ann's Square. Manchester Art Gallery ultimately stored more than 10,000 objects to form what is now known as the 'Manchester Together Archive' of the public response to the Manchester Arena attack. An associated research project was co-designed by the author with Manchester Art Gallery staff. The project aimed to document creatively the evolving thinking, interactions with different stakeholders and decision-making about the archive, as well as the impact of those decisions on institutional life, policy and practice. After reviewing the literature on museum practices around spontaneous memorials, this paper goes on to critically reflect on how cultural professionals in Manchester addressed the gap in their experience with spontaneous memorials by adapting or diverting from standard collecting processes. It aims to demonstrate that this was a creative process of negotiating the interaction between their professional ethics and a strong sense of civic and social responsibility, which led to a new museum practice altogether. The paper argues that this museum practice was also the result of accepting and inviting the migration of the memorial's characteristics (as a public, spontaneous and mass participation heritage performance) into the resulting Manchester Together Archive and the collecting process itself. This meant that the archive was not a 'collection' of the spontaneous memorial, but another form and manifestation of the memorial itself. The paper concludes with some brief thoughts on how this new museum practice around the Manchester Together Archive is impacting already on Manchester Art Gallery's broader policy and practice and its process of rethinking its spaces, activity and engagement with its publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses insights derived from a small-scale ethnographic study designed to explore young children's (aged three to six) everyday, lived experiences within a participatory family museum in southern England. Inspired by the childcentred work of Kirk (2014) this paper begins by examining the effectiveness of photo-elicitation interviews in accessing 'snap-shots' of children's perspectives of their museum visits. In the current study this method is complemented by the use of chest-mounted GoPro cameras to provide a first person and more holistic perspective of children's museum visits. 12 children's visits were filmed in total. During three of these, children were also carrying child-friendly digital cameras. As this was part of a larger study the data collection was designed to compare the utility of GoPro technology being used in tandem with both photo and drawingelicitation. In response to these initial findings a photo-map of the museum was created to prompt discussion with the final six participants. Recruitment was purposive and there was no contact with the participants prior to them arriving at the museum. The video captured by the chest-mounted Go-Pro cameras is particularly illuminating when analyzed in the context of the post-visit interview data. Although the photo-elicitation and drawing-elicitation interviews do reveal some important details about the children's experiences and perspectives, the video footage highlights the difficulties with relying on these methods in an everyday museum setting. For example parental involvement in the children's photography is far more pervasive than might be expected, and the degree to which the camera affects the nature of the children's visits is notable. The video also reveals how easy it is to misinterpret children when relying solely on their recollections in an interview situation. This paper finishes with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of using Go-Pro technology as a complementary tool in the exploration of young children's museum experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon qualitative research in El Museo del Bucardo - The Bucardo Museum - an exhibition space in the village of Torla, high in the Spanish Pyrenees. The bucardo was declared extinct on 6 January 2000 and rose to international fame three years later when scientists in Zaragoza delivered a bucardo clone; this event is commonly portrayed around the world as 'the first de-extinction'. Taxidermic remains of the last bucardo were absent from public view for years, yet they finally returned to Torla in 2013 following years of campaigning from local activists, and El Museo del Bucardo was founded. I draw upon interviews and archival material to present an environmental history of the bucardo as told through the lens of the museum, one which sets out to 'recover memory' and institutionalize the bucardo's legacy. In the museum, bucardo afterlives continue to shape understandings of situated Pyrenean wildlife. I examine El Museo del Bucardo's role in generating meaning in an epoch characterized by mass extinction and the spectacle of technofixes in the form of de-extinction science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative interviews were undertaken with visitors at five museums that display the histories and experiences of immigration in the United States and Australia. This paper outlines the range of embodied performative practices of meaning making that visitors undertook during their visits and the meanings and political values that they created or reaffirmed in doing so. The key performance at these museums were the affirmation and reinforcement of familial, ethnic and national identities in which individuals explored the tensions between migrant identity and the nationalizing narratives of the resident nation. The performance of reinforcement could also be used to justify both politically progressive and conservative narratives of inclusion and exclusion. Building on performances of reinforcement some visitors also engaged in acts of justification, recognition and misrecognition. In illustrating and mapping out the range of banal and complex ways these museums were used by visitors, the paper argues that museums may be more usefully understood as arenas of justification rather than resources for public education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the role that museums and art institutions have in recent years played in international relations, and their contribution to the concept of soft power, coined by Joseph Nye; referring to a country’s ability to persuade rather than coerce through elements of ‘hard’ power such as the threat of a strong military (Nye 2004). Using as examples the exchanges of the Cyrus Cylinder between Iran and the British Museum, and the loan of Picasso’s Buste de Femme (1943) from the Dutch Van Abbemuseum to the International Academy of Art Palestine, the paper argues that through their role as ‘national expressions of identity’ and ‘memory institutions’, museums and art institutions are able to make a positive contribution to international relations by engendering mutual respect and understanding in ways that other forms of dialogue may be unable to. As soft power is an area that still requires significant research, this paper aims to contribute observations and case studies that may affirm its influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the link between Asian-inspired material culture and musical theatre through the collections of Anglo-Australian performer Herbert Browne (1895- 1975). Brown played lead roles in 1920s Australian musical theatre productions of The Mikado and Chu Chin Chow and re-lived his connection with oriental theatre by collecting and responding to objects performatively in the Chinoiserie room of his Melbourne home. Oriental musical theatre blended exotic cultures and locales in visually spectacular productions which bore little resemblance to reality. The taste for escapist fiction in the theatre took place against a backdrop of museum collecting which aimed to reproduce authentic Asian and Other cultures. In this paper, I draw on French philosopher Merleau-Ponty's observations on the relationship between thought and the body's interaction with space to interpret the influence of Browne's theatricality on collecting choices. From this perspective, objects materialize particular understandings of the world which originate in the body and the body's performative engagement with space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to build a ground for thinking about museums' role in society and the development of the twenty-first century learner. The first and second parts of the paper focus on the influences technological evolution and current global challenges have brought to our lives, and the consequent requirements for 'new' learning and skills. The third part examines how different elements of new pedagogies and approaches could reinforce the twenty-first century learner and could, moreover, inspire museums. The final part of the paper focuses on the specific contribution that museums could make by integrating their unique identity and approach with elements from the new pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents research into exhibition-production practices at five national museums of four Baltic Sea region countries. The focus is the changes wrought by the expansion of exhibition teams, and how researchers in the curatorial role perceive their position, especially in relation to designers and project leaders. The analysis of semi-structured interviews with museum professionals showed exhibition production at museums comprise two models: A) curator-driven, and B) manager-driven. In Model A, the curator's knowledge of museum collections is dominant. The curator creates the concept, and subsequently leads the exhibition project. The curator is the decision maker. In Model B, the field of communication is dominant. Managers are in charge of the design concept and fulfilling the exhibition. Managers are the decision makers. Curators feel their credibility as experts suffers and their competencies are underexploited, as they no longer have either authorship or leadership responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the state of ethnological collections in two post-apartheid South African museums and is based on, inter alia, an appraisal of anthropological discourses that informed the collections. It focuses on the cataloguing of indigenous objects, which is generally inadequate and, in many cases, absent. This not only hampers the proper functioning of museums, but threatens the preservation of ancient, culturally significant items. In this context, a discussion of the artefacts' background would be of importance to establish their origins, the motives for their presence in collections, and their current state. Presently, however, such information is difficult to obtain, since persons who have knowledge regarding the makers, donors and collectors of artefacts are no longer part of the museums' establishment. Besides, many ethnological collections result from fieldwork trips by anthropologists and persons with an interest in ethnology but, sadly, many of their contributions lack identification and other pertinent information. Anthropologists, museum workers, and donors who have contributed to the presence -- and, hence, survival -- of artefacts in social history and cultural history museums have failed to provide them with tangible records. With only patchy information available, it is evident that present curators face a huge challenge in cataloguing such materials so that they can be better preserved and further researched. Using postcolonial theory to provide a critical analysis of the current situation, based on available archival records and unstructured interviews with museum officials and researchers, I contend that the lacklustre manner of assessing items of indigenous material culture in museums of ethnography, and the accompanying decontextualization, are irreconcilable with their original socio-cultural and environmental significance, their meanings and technological trends. The question is how to reverse this neglect of collections of rare indigenous material culture so as to arouse the warranted interest of local and wider audiences and restore the connection with indigenous histories that in the colonial and apartheid era have been ignored and deemed irrelevant to the 'grand march of Western historicism' (McClintock 1994: 292). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that applying time-related concepts in museum exhibitions and events can contribute constructively to people's engagement with climate change. Climate change now and future presents particular challenges as it is perceived to be psychologically distant. The link between this distance and effective climate action is complex and presents an opportunity for museums, as sites where psychological distance can be explored in safe, consequence-free ways. This paper explores how museums can help people develop an understanding of their place within the rhetoric of climate change, and assist them with their personal or collective response to the climate challenge. To do so, we find that two time- and place-related concepts, Brian Eno's the Big Here and Long Now and Foucault's heterotopia, can provide useful framings through which museums can support constructive climate change engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mapping Museums research team recently compiled a dataset of UK museums in existence between 1960 and 2020. In doing so, we had to decide what should be counted as a museum. In this paper, we outline the approaches that we initially took to establish the criteria for selection: adopting a conventional museum definition, using key characteristics, and respecting the venue's selfidentification; and we describe why they proved inadequate with respect to the heterogeneity of museum practice. We then explain how assemblage theory helped us conceptualize the complex realities of the museum sector and address the problem of selection. This approach has enabled us to develop a non-essentializing model of museums and to outline a more inclusive account of the UK museum sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on research in a range of UK museums, this paper explores the visibility and invisibility of the photographic legacy of colonial relations and the representation of the colonial past in museum galleries. It explores the conditions of the 'invisibility' and 'disavowal' of the colonial past in the historical narrative developed by museums, and the anxieties that cluster around such narratives in a postcolonial and multicultural society. The paper argues that the photographic legacy of the colonial past offers a way into those histories, but it is one that can only be realized through the critical engagement with photographs themselves and the work they might be made to do in museums. As an example, it examines the active and complex role of photographs played in the galleries of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol. It concludes that the failure of museums to integrate colonial pasts into their narratives has worked against the wider liberal agendas to which museums subscribe, and that photographic invisibility is both a symptom of and metaphor for the 'invisibility' of the colonial past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implications of the categorical separation between Nature, Culture and History that is common in Western museums. It focuses on the Royal British Columbia Museum's (RBCM) configuration of galleries, which separates, first, the human from the natural world, and, second, First Peoples from modern history. With the basic structure of its galleries remaining largely unchanged since the 1970s, but with significant alterations and additions, the RBCM is a palimpsest whose layers can be read in relation to the changing sociopolitical contexts and hegemonic ideals through which British Columbia has been imagined and represented. Its division of Nature, Culture and History represents a perspective entangled with European colonialism, but also offers opportunities for contesting colonial legacies and rethinking what these categories might mean. By adding new layers that engage with the earlier interpretive strategies, the Museum both contributes to and acts as a site for ongoing conversations that connect past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specimen exchange saw widespread use in the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries among museum-based anthropologists as a means of collections growth and refinement. This paper examines organizational aspects of specimen exchange at the Field Museum, and presents a case study of exchanges between anthropology curator Paul Martin and Harold Gladwin of the Gila Pueblo Archaeological Foundation. I show how Martin navigated both the Field Museum's centralized administration and other curators in charge of various collections to provide Gladwin the specimens he desired, arguing that understandings of specimen exchange must consider both organizational policy, and personal-professional praxis. Though specimen exchange is no longer practiced by museum-based anthropologists, as a form of deaccessioning it provides a venue to consider how the use and valuation of anthropological collections figures into their circulation out of museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At stake in this paper is the nature of the relationship between the institution of the museum and the common world. It is contended that such relations are regularly asserted through cosmopolitan appeals, which are premised on the assumption that a cosmos, a world, a universal, pre-exists its articulation, and, that it is the task of reason and of science to adjust the citizen-subject to this already-present condition. This paper argues that this is a flawed position because it assumes, in fact, what is required to be built: a world in common. In defence of this proposition, two recent declarations of museum cosmopolitanism are explored: ICOM's declaration on the 'universal museum', which focuses on the unity of the cultural heritage of humankind; and the Buffon Declaration, which concerns institutions of natural history and the imperilment of humanity's biospheric inheritance. Subsequently, the paper turns to what might be called the empirics of the cosmopolitanism of the museum visitor. This examines the qualitative investigation of banal or everyday cosmopolitanism, which is largely ignored by such museum declarations. These different museological articulations of a common world are, in turn, reviewed through the juxtaposition of two sociologies: Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitanism and Bruno Latour's compositionism. It is in contrasting these various mobilizations of the cosmopolitan - the museological, the empirical and the sociological - that the paper advances its proposition: namely, that these cosmopolitan claims are based on the assumption that a common world exists prior to its assemblage as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museums offer significant learning experiences that contribute to sustainable societies and lifelong learning. However, museum education has historically been a field in flux, and a constant revitalization is needed. This paper examines Biophilia, created by artist and musician Björk, as a case-study to illustrate the potential of its pedagogical approach to affect sustainable museum learning practices. Biophilia inspires children to learn about sound, science, and nature through technology; it is an app-album that manifested itself in a museum context both as a concert venue and a multi-disciplinary experimental educational platform--ideal for museum learning. While the project was formally implemented in Iceland through high levels of inter-institutional collaboration, its theoretical relationship to museum education and critical pedagogy of place was overlooked. Using Biophilia's analogy of an 'infectious virus' and a futurist's framework of creativity and play, I ask: what can the field of museum education learn from Biophilia?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a recent controversy at the new Canadian War Museum over its exhibition on the Allied Bomber Offensive campaign in the Second World War. Although recent surveys of the public's attitudes towards museums suggest that the public both trusts museums to get the story right and thinks museums are good places to deal with controversial topics, in this case the Museum found itself under attack. In the end, despite generally positive reviews from historians called in to review the display, the Museum was forced to make changes after a Parliamentary sub-committee demanded it do so. The paper argues that the Museum's inability to withstand such intense pressure can be attributed to a number of factors, including its ambiguous nature as a war memorial museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the boundaries and partial connections between amateurs and professionals in the context of a museum of natural history. It examines how these boundaries are made and unmade, paying particular attention to their materiality and their heterogeneity. My aim is to draw the temporal, spatial and material profiles of amateurs and professionals. In doing so, the paper focuses on the partial connections between amateurs and professionals and shows that, in a sense, amateurs and professionals belong to more than one but less than many social spaces. I will further argue that professionalization and amateurisation are not merely historical processes, but also processes that happen in everyday practices in order to demarcate specific identities. While amateurs can be involved in co-producing science with professionals, they still might resist and avoid translation in order to protect their independence and concentrate their identity as amateur practitioners of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses one aspect of a major research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of family group visitors to museums and galleries in the UK. Grandparents visiting with their grandchildren are a little understood phenomenon in terms of visitor research and this paper aims to address that balance. The research project focuses on three art galleries and museums in the UK where 44 sets of grandparents were interviewed during the initial stages of the research. Findings have shown a number of interesting facets, some of which are presented in this paper. Grandparents are motivated to visit the museum with their grandchildren in the main because they are seeking an entertaining visit, a day out that is also educational and linked to school projects. They are likely to be the children's primary carers as parents are out to work and the destination might not link with their own interests but those of the parents. They have social roles to play in their grandchildren's lives. They often seek activity or workshops in the museum/art gallery that will be of benefit for their grandchildren and encourage them to explore the activities provided. These and other aspects are discussed within the paper. We conclude by suggesting how the findings can be used to inform more sophisticated approaches to 'family friendly' initiatives in museums and art galleries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of cultural capital is well known in museum studies from pioneering visitor research conducted and reported by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s. This paper examines the concept in the light of the criticism that, whilst it illuminates the dynamics of cultural consumption and inequality in advanced capitalist societies, its socio-genesis is less well understood. It is argued that the historical sociology of fine art reproduction provides an opportunity to (i) enlarge our understanding of its formation and (ii) to explore the cultural character of the copy and the sociology of the body. The paper draws on Marx's concept of primitive accumulation, on Connerton's distinction between incorporated and inscribing practices and on Bourdieu's distinction between three states of cultural capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines museum evaluation activities in their social and political context and advocates the need for evaluation strategies in the cultural sector. It analyses the case of the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, which commissioned the design of such a strategy as part of its current project for the redevelopment of displays and visitor facilities. The Strategy covered the evaluation of the new displays, of orientation provision, of the new and improved facilities, as well as information to inform future policies and plans. The paper examines methodological issues related to the design of the evaluation strategy and to evaluation work at the Museum in general. It also examines the objectives set by the specific project and the relevant actions suggested by the strategy in order to meet these. Finally, it critically examines the role and effectiveness of evaluation in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extraordinary and brave work of Ukrainian museum workers to protect collections and to continue activities in the face of war exemplifies the possibilities for similar institutions in conflict situations. This paper illustrates some of the main activities of Ukrainian museums from the period of the outbreak of war on 24 February 2022 through to August of the same year, focusing especially on exhibitions, educational programmes, and events, both online and on-site. This research is based on thematic and chronological approaches, using data from descriptions of educational projects on museum websites and social media. The article analyzes museum exhibitions on Russian aggression as well as museum programmes more broadly. The organization of online and offline museum events, projects, excursions, exhibitions, classes for children and refugees, museum workers’ meetings on Museum Day (May 2022), the opening of a new museum, actions in support of the armed forces of Ukraine, and volunteer activities of museum workers in Ukraine are briefly presented. While this article can touch on these broad and diverse topics only briefly, it underlines the value and necessity of further studies focused on the adaptation mechanisms of museums in the challenging conditions of war.

Visitor engagement at museums is an area that has received significant attention from museum practitioners and academics over the last decade. However, very few studies have sought to understand how and why visitors may actively employ strategies to shut down attempts to elicit deep emotional engagement with museum material and messages. This paper looks at an exhibition in a major museum in Australia that discusses mental health and illness. It discusses the high rates of emotional disengagement that were found amongst 172 visitors who were faced with emotionally confronting material and argues that emotions enabled, as well as hindered, constructive, critical reflection amongst visitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many museums nowadays provide multilingual services, translations in museums have not received enough attention from researchers. The issue of how ideology is embedded in museum texts is translated is particularly underresearched. Since museums are often important sites for tourists to learn about a nation, translation plays a pivotal role in mediating how international visitors construct the host nation's identity. The translation of national identity is even more important when sensitive topics are dealt with, such as exhibitions of the past in memorial museums. This paper takes the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum as a case study to examine how Taiwanese identity is formatted in the Chinese text and reframed in the English translation. The current study found inconsistent historical perspectives embedded in both texts, particularly in the English translation. We argue that, without awareness of ideological assumptions embedded in translations, museums run the risk of sending unintended messages to international visitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museums are attending to matters of technique in relation to objects and exhibitions suggesting a new or renewed interest in creative practice and how objects are made. This focus parallels practices and changes occurring in broader society. In this article I argue that a rise in attending to technique extends what various theorists have referred to as the 'material turn' in a dimension that underscores creative process and making. I do so by exploring two recent exhibitions, one in Israel and another in Australia, which have brought the notion of technique into focus through the context of textiles and other materials such as paper, porcelain, wood and metal. Through their emphasis on 'gathering' and 'folding', the construction of textiles and other forms are accentuated for public exploration, fostering new understandings of technique. Conclusions are drawn connecting museum contexts with that of broader society in reference to making, the role of the hand, and craft processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the results of recent empirical research on the interaction of structure and agency in the museums sector in England in the context of policy-making within individual museums and galleries. Policy in the museums sector is subject to a large number of political, economic, social and technological pressures and demands that are both externally and internally created: the management of these pressures and demands provides the opportunity for the establishment of multiple responses by the members of individual organizations. The effects of hierarchy, organizational and functional centrality, accountability and professionalism in this process, and the manner in which legitimacy and ideology are employed as central resources by museums staff, are identified. The focus on an under-researched issue allows for an original evaluation of claims and assumptions about what drives the policy choices that are made within museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the potential for the deployment of oral history in the museum space to challenge hegemonic narratives on the past and enhance multivocality. Following an overview of the general merits of oral history and debates about its use in museums, we set out the arguments in favour of combining such an approach with the notion of agonistic memory. We then move to a comparative analysis between the Schindler’s Factory exhibition in Krakow and the Voices of 68 project at National Museums NI’s Ulster Museum, Belfast to explore the limitations and benefits of digital storytelling as a tool for disrupting linear narratives. In so doing, this article showcases and explains the potency of combining oral history with agonism in encouraging radical multiperspectivity that takes representations of the past beyond the curtailed benefits engendered by approaches focussed on multivocality alone.

Traditional art museum exhibitions are planned according to art-historical elements. At Trapholt -- a museum of modern Danish art, design and applied art in Denmark, we are interested in exploring what happens when ordinary visitors are invited to curate personal exhibitions in the museum space. This paper analyses the project The Kaleidoscope of Culture, where people with no art historical background were invited to curate exhibitions based on the Trapholt collection of art and their own cultural backgrounds and experiences. The main argument is that, by allowing these personal voices in the museum space, new museum narratives are established. But to make the museum a truly transformative space the art- historical knowledge and methods must also be activated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1992 El Salvador ended a 12-year civil war infamous in part for the high level of state violence against innocent civilians. A United Nations Truth Commission report, which detailed these and other excesses, recommended that state and society commemorate the war and its violence to advance the establishment of a more just nation. The postwar government did construct an impressive new National Museum of Anthropology to actively promote national culture, history, and identity. However, this important museum remains silent about the civil war. In contrast, new public--though not official - museums and monuments are finally bringing attention to the civil war and past state violence. This paper explores the social memory work of non-official museums, arguing that by combating silence and forgetting, their truth-telling aims to shape ideas about the nation and improve state-society dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we investigate two anthropological assemblages in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the 1920s and 1930s and how each were used in the adjudication of forms of governmental regulation of Māori populations. We explore the radically different agencements and socio-technical arrangements of people, things and ideas that were formulated within these contexts. Henry Devenish Skinner, curator of the Otago Museum and Anthropology lecturer at the University of Otago, Dunedin, formulated his assemblages based on archaeological fieldwork, ethnology and Wissler's culture area concept. Indigenous anthropologist Peter Buck and his associates the politicians Āpirana Ngata and Māui Pōmare formulated their distinct assemblages for operating on the Māori social according to living performative culture and anthropological fieldwork. Through these contrasting collecting, fieldwork and ordering regimes, different views of Māori as liberal subjects emerged to articulate ways the Indigenous population could enter into the cultural life of the emerging nation. Indigenous agency was ultimately to become of paramount importance in liberal governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convergence of museums, libraries and archives is a trend that has manifested itself internationally within the last decade. Its incorporation into government cultural policies has led to significant investment and the formation of new institutions in a number of countries, while provoking discussion across the library, archives and museum sectors. Improved knowledge acquisition for users of collections is often cited as justification for convergence. However, while the creation of knowledge in museum, library or archive settings has been explored in a range of scholarship, the fundamental concept of 'knowledge' and its dissemination has not been comprehensively discussed in regard to convergence of these institutions. In response, this paper examines information, knowledge and epistemology in the context of convergence and challenges the legitimacy of the claim that convergence will deliver greater knowledge to collection users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museums, zoos and heritage sites increasingly rely on interpretation of their resources to provide distinctive experiences that attract and engage visitors. However, the practice of designing interpretation is little researched and ill-defined. Through interviews and case studies the research seeks to better understand the role of design in interpretation projects in an Australian context and articulates practitioner perspectives about the aims and issues of their work. The paper argues that interpretation design is a field of specialized yet interdisciplinary practice that exemplifies the highly collaborative and strategic nature of contemporary design practice. Often working outside traditional museum contexts, practitioners' challenges include limited understanding by many stakeholders and clients, unsuitable project structures and limited published research that integrates interpretation and design. This article is an early step in meeting these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I investigate the practice of community engagement, and suggest that ideas around emotion work and emotional labour might offer new ways of thinking about the role of museum staff in community engagement settings. Through material gathered as part of an ethnographic research project conducted with Glasgow Museums -- the city of Glasgow's municipal museums service - I show that community engagement practitioners routinely utilize emotional performances as part of their work. I argue that, often, the emotion work that is done in these settings is under-valued, and suggest that both scholars of museums and museum professionals need to pay more attention to the interpersonal relationships that might be forged within community engagement settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses several issues that museums face when utilizing social media in their international communication. This discussion is framed within the discourse of the new cultural diplomacy and this paper proposes a specific role for museums in cross-cultural diplomatic relations. This new model for contemporary museums as vehicles for a 'trans-cultural encounter', or a 'forum' is based on the shift within museum institutional structures across communication, educational and political dimensions. Drawing on empirical materials, this study identifies three specific ways in which museums can use social media in their international diplomatic endeavours. The first section discusses how social technology can aid museums in responding to issues and concerns originating from foreign communities. This is followed by a discussion of how social media can connect foreign audiences to the cultural content of museums through direct participation activities. Finally, social media can enhance cultural exchange among people from different cultural communities by bringing them together online for collaborative activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that although museums have increasingly changed their mission to embrace 'spectacular' and 'commercial' goals in recent decades, their audiences resist this redefinition of the museum's role. Based on a structural equation model derived from a survey of 1,900 visitors of the six main galleries of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, it shows that different kinds of visitors tend to share the same conceptualization of what museums signify, as a kind of 'educative leisure'. They continue to differentiate museums from more commercial forms of leisure, and associate them with schooling and educational processes. We demonstrate that this appreciation of 'educative leisure' is shared by visitors from different socio-demographic backgrounds and is affected by other dimensions of the visitors' profiles, such as the practice of creative activities or recent experiences of other art places (commercial galleries, fairs, contemporary art centers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the position of the museum sector in relation to public policy-making about climate change. It is informed by the perspectives of museum and science centre visitors and leaders canvassed as part of the Australian Research Council Linkage project, 'Hot Science, Global Citizens: the agency of the museum sector in climate change interventions'. We apply complexity theory to evaluate the claim that museums are a site for the enaction of deliberative democracy. In doing so, we reveal a cultural opportunity for cultural institutions to play a more expansive and explicit role in brokering social futures for communities confronted by climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change as a complex, scientific, cultural, ideological, and transnational issue poses a new set of challenges for museums and science centres as places to inform, and as information sources in debates and decision processes. In this paper, I draw on quantitative and qualitative research from the Australian Research Council funded Linkage project, Hot Science, Global Citizens: the agency of the museum sector in climate change interventions, to interrogate the potentialities for institutions to operate meaningfully and in new ways in complex media ecologies and dense mediations of political, social, scientific discourses, and expertize. In developing the concepts liquid governmentalities and liquid museums, I pose new leverage points for institutions to operate within these pluralistic and complex governmental assemblages from one of the production of science statements to reform behaviour, to systems of open peer review and as places for facilitating complex reflexivity and creative dispositions for the future in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1845 and 1914 several municipal museums in Great Britain established an industrial collection of objects relevant to local manufacture. The origins of these collections are found in the 1830s and the reform of design education. Industrial collections assigned an economic function to museums and were contested by critics who maintained that museums should be concerned primarily with fine rather than applied art. It is argued that curatorial decisions on the adoption of industrial collections can be evaluated with reference to contemporary debates on art, design education and the relative values of liberal and applied knowledge. Through case studies of the municipal museums of Birmingham and Preston, this paper assesses contrasting curatorial responses to industrial collections. Adopting Matthew Arnold's categories of Hebraism and Hellenism as an exploratory framework, it concludes that industrial collections represented materialistic values associated with Hebraism that were directly opposed to the spiritual values associated with Hellenism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To coincide with emerging arts and health practices, University College London Museums & Collections and University College London Hospitals Arts partnered to create a pilot project, entitled "Heritage in Hospitals", which sought to assess whether handling museum objects has a positive impact on patient wellbeing. Quantitative data from 32 sessions conducted with patients in May through July (inclusive) of 2008 demonstrated, on average, an increase in self-reported measures of life satisfaction and health status after handling museum objects. Constant comparative analysis of the qualitative data collected from the sessions revealed two major recurring themes: "impersonal/educational" and "personal/reminiscence". The first theme included instances where handling museum objects allowed patients to access truths about the objects ascertainable solely through touch (such as gauging weight, texture, temperature, and spatial relation to the body), to verify what was seen, to facilitate an intimate and imaginative connection with the museum objects and their origins, to investigate and explore the objects, to permit an interaction with the "rare" and "museum-worthy", and to assist with aesthetic appreciation. The second theme illustrated the project's potential to assist with counselling on issues of illness, death, loss and mourning, and to help restore dignity, respect and a sense of identity (particularly among elderly patients) by providing a springboard for reminiscing and the telling of life stories in a highly institutionalized setting. This paper contextualizes the project, explores the implications of the project's methodology and its findings, and provides questions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the example of three experimental museum sound installations, this paper discusses the translation into practice of the intention to make meaningful connections between diverse social positions and experiences. We use the term 'dialogic' to theorise these interactive intentions and show them at work in the content, development processes and form of the sound installations. Our discussion is framed by the collaboration between the authors across the disciplines of museum studies and creative practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why museums, both currently and historically, have excluded material relating to people with intellectual impairments. The national picture is examined briefly before the focus shifts to three UK museums in York, Leeds and Colchester where curatorial attitudes to including and presenting material on learning disability are compared and contrasted. Curatorial anxieties about the subject, a lack of national guidance on how to address learning disability in museum collections and displays and the elusive nature of available sources of material appears to discourage museums addressing the issue. Nevertheless, a few examples show that with organizational and professional commitment and the adoption of facilitative and consultative approaches, museums can present the history of learning disability in exciting and thought provoking ways that challenge pre-conceptions about intellectually impaired people. Given museums' responsibilities under the Disability Discrimination Act (2005), the significance of the social inclusion agenda and calls for new museological practices, there has never been a better time for museums to re-evaluate their approaches to learning impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the District of Nibutani, Town of Biratori, Hokkaido, Japan, the inheritance of Ainu culture has been in a critical condition recently, despite the long-term struggle of a famous Ainu, Kayano Shigeru. From 2002 to 2005, the town developed the Ainu Culture Cluster Project under the auspices of the Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum. The Project's goals were hiring local unemployed people to acquire traditional skills and encouraging local residents to inherit Ainu culture. This project is interesting because it demonstrates not only the ways and processes to develop, represent, promote, and inherit Ainu culture, but also the relation between the museum and the community and local residents. This paper discusses both the positive and negative aspects of the Ainu Culture Cluster Project, and explores the roles of a community-based museum for indigenous cultural promotion in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last thirty years museums around the world have shown an increased willingness to take on what is often characterized as 'difficult subject matter.' Absent in Anglophone museum studies literature, however, is a sustained discussion on what it is about such exhibitions that render them 'difficult' and, most important, what can be achieved by making painful histories public. This paper sets out to stimulate such discussion, illustrating the relevance of our concerns within the context of a comparative analysis of two recent Swedish exhibitions: The Museum of World Culture's No Name Fever: AIDS in the Age of Globalization; and Kulturen's Surviving: Voices from Ravensbrück. Very divergent in their presentation strategies and in the type of information presented, these exhibitions attempt to position their viewers in relation to violence and suffering of 'others' distant in time, place, or experience. We conclude by discussing the ways in which public history might animate a critical historical consciousness, a way of living with and within history as a never-ending question that constantly probes the adequacy of the ethical character and social arrangements of daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]