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Material and interactive exhibits are important elements of many sites of learning, including science, technology, history and natural history museums. Parks and nature preserves are not usually identified as museums, and their purpose and mission do not necessarily align with the mission focus of museums. We argue here, however, that permanent environmental education exhibits at preserves should be treated as museums for analytic purposes. Preserve displays typically include collections of objects from within the park’s boundaries, i.e., bones, shells, rocks, skeletons, feathers, pelts, cones, etc., in addition to manufactured displays presenting ecosystems and physical as well as living elements of the environment. Exhibits at preserves have not been the focus of scholarship on museums to date. Bringing together analytic tools developed for museum experiences with evaluative frameworks from the field of environmental education provides a rich set of concepts for understanding the work that nature preserve exhibits do to increase ecoliteracy. We analyze permanent and interactive educational exhibits at three nature preserves in Florida through the application of a series of interdisciplinary and overlapping frameworks. We identify opportunities for transmission of knowledge about the environment and human interactions with local landscapes; opportunities for cognitive engagement with material artefacts and for participation in knowledge construction. We identify messages that use emotional engagement to encourage visitors to become active citizens on behalf of nature and humans; and to ultimately engage in sustainable actions to solve environmental problems.

This article contributes to the analysis and transparency of the practical processes of interdisciplinary exhibition-making. It identifies the academic discourse on interdisciplinarity as having the potential to provide a meaningful input to the formation of theory on temporary exhibition-making. The subject of enquiry is a recent case study from Germany. It investigates the relationships and decision-making processes that underpinned the production of the interdisciplinary exhibition Weather Report – About Weather Culture and Climate Science (Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 2017/18), which combined curatorial perspectives from the fields of art, cultural history and science. It traces the curatorial process, from forming an interdisciplinary team and negotiating conceptual ideas and methods, to object choices, interpretation and exhibition design. I argue that the complexity of interdisciplinary exhibition-making calls for a more precise and practice-oriented application of what is an often generalized notion of interdisciplinarity. By discerning between multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity, and understanding the three terms as offering different qualities of interaction and integration, I suggest using these terms as a finer vocabulary for a detailed description and analysis of the practical processes of collaborative exhibition-making. Taking interdisciplinarity seriously also inevitably leads to the question of institutional consequences.

In connection with today’s competition between cities to portray an alluring image of economic and cultural success, the City of Helsinki and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation put forward a plan to establish a Guggenheim museum in Helsinki, Finland. Following the plan’s release, a heated public debate emerged in the media. The present article analyzes this debate as a mediatized conflict and aims to show in what ways the debate on the Guggenheim report affected the decision-making process concerning the Helsinki Guggenheim museum. This debate is analyz ed within the framework of current discussions on the culture-led development of cities, by applying a methodological tool inspired by Luc Boltanski’s and Laurent Thevenot’s theory of critical judgement to analyze the various justifications that the different actors used during the debate. Further, the article interprets why the museum plan was rejected in the first deliberation. It was found that t he distance between different actors grew so wide th at it could not be reconciled, especially with the effect of social media. Because the City did not encourage a discussion and communication with the art world was neglected at first , during the debate it proved impossible to convince the art world of the benefits a Guggenheim might bring to other art institutions or artists. Guggenheim Helsinki was planned for a small capital in northern Europe, and yet it is linked to current European politics affected by nationalistic ideology and the question of preserving local cultures in the face of a globally shared culture. T he article ends with a discussion on what can be learned from the fai lure of the Guggenheim Helsinki.

The paper examines the state of ethnological collections in two post-apartheid South African museums, with a specific focus on cataloguing, and is based, inter alia, on an appraisal of anthropological discourses that informed the collections. A discussion of the artefacts’ background is of importance in establishing their origins, motives for their presence in collections and the current state of these collections. Presently, such information is difficult to establish since persons who have knowledge regarding the makers, donors and collectors of artefacts are no longer part of the museums’ establishment. Evidently, curators face a huge challenge in cataloguing such materials with only patchy information available.In South Africa many ethnological collections of artefacts produced by Africans are 'owned' by heritage institutions, but the care expanded on the objects consists mainly in placing them in storeroom facilities where they are distant from custodians, devoid of identifying material, and insufficiently researched. 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 what to do with museum collections of rare indigenous material culture, created in the colonial and apartheid era but which, unfortunately, are left without relevant information?

For SHORT INSIGHT PAPERS - Museums and COVID 19: First Responses. Our undertsanding is that no abstract is required. Do let us know if you need one.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of self-care was trending in the museum field. In the thick of the pandemic, webinars from multiple museum-related professional associations featured discussion around the topic. Meditation, simplification, time outdoors, physical activity and 'unplugging' were commonly discussed practices. Seldom discussed, however, was the practice of gratitude. Current studies provide evidence of the benefits of gratitude to both emotional and physical health. While gratitude will not solve the challenges of a pandemic, at Thanksgiving Point we found tapping into the origins of our name to be a refreshing response to coping with them.

In this opinion piece I reflect upon museum social media trends during COVID-19 and consider what it could mean in terms of future online engagement and the (mis)alignment of practices with institutional social missions. In opposition to the recent focus on uplifting museum content and activities online, I investigate an overlooked question regarding the role of challenging heritage on social media during the pandemic. I end with a call for the sector to consider the complexities of including or excluding challenging heritage from current museum online activities and in turn, the opening or foreclosure of critical reflections at a pivotal time in history.

This article discusses the response of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University, to the COVID-19 pandemic, and in particular the development of the second series of the museum's podcast That Feels Like Home.

This short article focuses on two heritage sites (the International Bomber Command Centre and Creswell Crags) and reflects on the ways in which such medium-size institutions are trying to find ways of maintaining offsite engagement with young audiences while at the same time generating revenues.

On January 26, 2018 the painting Hylas and the Nymphs was temporarily removed from the Manchester Art Gallery’s walls and taken underground to its store. The removal was part of a ‘takeover’ event that questioned the relationships between historic works of art and contemporary social-cultural contexts. The following days saw a barrage of online comments accusing the Gallery of censorship, of ‘feminism gone mad’, and of inadequacy. In this article I use Twitter data and Actor Network Theory to explore how a community and a narrative took shape around the takeover. The analysis shows how this Nymphgate network was influenced by a series of human and non-human actors, as well as by Twitter’s technological affordances. This study is part of a larger project, as such it leads to question the potential effects of this mediatized debacle to the Gallery’s organizational strategy — including the roles of, and relationships between, decision-makers, social media, and visitors within it.

We seek to demonstrate how corpus linguistic techniques can facilitate a comprehensive account of curatorial voice in a large digitised museum catalogue and hence leverage its value as a resource for generating new knowledge about: curatorial practice; the historical and cultural contexts of curation; and, the content of collections. We worked with 1.1 million words written by the historian M. Dorothy George between 1930 and 1954 to describe 9330 late-Georgian satirical prints. George’s curatorial descriptions were analysed in terms of their typical informational content and with regards to the extent George included interpretation and evaluation in her descriptions. We discuss how results from such analyses can provide a basis for addressing questions about George’s curatorial voice and, more generally, suggest how this approach could benefit museological practice around the production of descriptions and the re-purposing of legacy catalogues for digital access and analysis of collections.

This article explains the value of assemblage theory to making sense of a museum like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), which has struggled with the formidable challenge of comparatively representing human rights in controversial cultural and historical contexts. I argue that “assemblage thinking” permits us to appreciate more richly the way in which the expressive power of the CMHR arises from the dynamic interaction/intersection of overlapping clusters of objects, spaces, ideologies, memories, feelings, structures, histories, and experiences. Understood as “assemblages,” these clusters in important (but not all) ways lie beyond the scope of formal agency such as that exercised by curators and museum administrators. Accordingly, we must understand museums generally, and the CMHR particularly, as fundamentally unable guarantee the integrity and perdurability of their/its own structures and meanings, and recognize these meanings (and a museum’s identity) as irreducibly open-ended and provisional.

The Museum of Sundry Objects, located in Sólgarður, about 25 kilometers north of Akureyri, offers a site to think carefully about a number of key elements of museum practice, including the logic of collection, the practice of object “array,” and the role of the museum “heroic” object. Where the heroic object directs one to move from the individual to the imagined array, the array opens a different set of possibilities for recognizing the singularity of objects. In addition, a close examination of the Sundry suggests that “the museum” may simply be one stage of many in the ongoing life of the object, an extended liminal phase that offers a number of opportunities for the re-enlivening of the objects, a different set of steps on the path of the inbetween.

This paper considers Beneath the Surface: The Archives of Arthur Nestor, a parafictional exhibition that I curated in 2014 with 16 undergraduate students at Western University, Canada. The exhibition depicted the life of Dr. Arthur Nestor, a professor of Biology who had disappeared from London (ON) in 1975, seemingly without trace. Over the summer of 2014, some of Nestor’s files and artefacts had been discovered during university renovations, and this archive was given to students in Museum Studies to organize and catalogue. As we sorted through the files, it became clear that Dr. Nestor was something of a controversial figure, a man who became an environmental activist in Southwestern Ontario because of his belief that cryptids (lake monsters) lived in Lakes Huron and Erie, and were in need of protection from human-made pollution. As the documents in his file overlapped with our research in the wider sphere, the evidence seemed to suggest that Nestor had left London to join Dr. Roy Mackal, a University of Chicago professor of cryptozoology searching for the Loch Ness Monster. This paper weaves together the tale of Arthur Nestor and the curating of Beneath the Surface with a history of the relationship between natural history museums and cryptozoology, ultimately questioning what parafiction can do in both art galleries and museums.

This article concerns efforts to increase the accessibility of art through digital collections on the web. Features for display and comparison used by the platform of the Swedish artist Ivar Arosenius and by web projects such as Europeana and Google Art & Culture will be discussed. These features include random display, recommendations and machine learning of visual similarities. Key questions are: What are the general implications of these features for the art history canon? What are the relations between the digital collections on the web and the physical museum? There is a risk that recommendations based on machine learning will come to influence the way we perceive similarity. If the canon is to be challenged, a closer cooperation between the digital collections and the physical exhibitions will be needed.

Holocaust exhibitions are known for their unique iconography, often constructed by means of exhibition design. This article focuses on how visitors construct meaning based on display choices made by exhibitions designers. It presents insights from an audience research study which was conducted with young visitors of The Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London. It addresses how design choices impact on the visitor’s engagement and understanding of the Holocaust Exhibition. By drawing on visitor comments, this article shows that design plays a significant role in shaping visitors’ understanding of the Holocaust, as well as their level of engagement, focus and emotional response. It further makes several practical suggestions, informed by visitor feedback, regarding the development of new Holocaust exhibition designs.

This article aims to reflect on the aporias and paradoxes of a postcolonial, collaborative research approach to ethnographic collections dating from colonial times. While, at least in Germany, ‘provenance research’ and ‘collaboration’ have become politically opportune, important questions concerning the possibilities or impossibilities of overcoming colonial categories, epistemologies and imbalances of power remain to be answered. Based on research and collaboration with stakeholders over the course of two projects on the Tanzania collections of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, this article asks how far ‘collaboration’ and ‘decolonization’ risk remaining merely empty, fashionable phrases, if, on the one hand, today’s concern with the colonial context of collections in European museums seems to be to a great extent self-referential and avoiding radical criticism of today’s power asymmetries; and, on the other, the deconstruction of colonial class, gender, race, and ethnic categorizations, and of the resulting representations is hindered – if not made impossible – by the epistemologies implicit in the order of the collections themselves but also by identity politics

For the past 20 years, the main focus of repatriation-related publications has been how the return of human remains has affected the institutions in which the remains reside. Be that with regard to the loss to science or public good, or changes in the way human remains are now cared for, treated, displayed, and stored. But what about the effects on the descendant communities from which these remains originate? There are some examples of Indigenous perspectives regarding the importance of repatriation in the literature, but these are few and far between by comparison. This article examines the importance of returning Māori ancestral remains back to descendant communities, and the development of the repatriation movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. The ethical consideration relating to research on Māori ancestral remains is also explored to understand how scientific research is viewed and used in the Aotearoa New Zealand context. Certain academics and scientists have commented over the years that repatriation is a loss to science and a purely political ploy. It is hoped that by sharing some of the impacts that are dealt with from a Māori perspective, that there is a better understanding of how this effects indigenous communities all around the world.

While occasional earlier restitutions of colonially acquired human remains, mostly skulls, from German anthropological collections to source communities went largely unnoticed, it seems that such repatriations have 'taken off' since the hand-over of 20 skulls to a Namibian delegation in 2011. It is, however, difficult to get a comprehensive overview of these events, given the German federal system and the diversity of institutions involved. Moreover, there is no standard as to how much provenance research should be conducted before returning human remains and how much detail should be published, if at all. This article reviews repatriations of human remains from German institutions and related publications. It argues for authors and institutions to publish and publicize these events and related research more widely. It also looks at the variability of the political context of these processes and argues for more direct, i.e. government-independent contacts between collecting institutions and source communities.

This brief essay highlights the major themes of the issue while describing the challenges museums have faced during the COVID-19 epidemic and simultaneous Black Lives Matter movement.

Review of three books: Gonzales, Elena, Exhibitions for Social Justice. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2020, hardback £120, paperback £34.99, ebook £31.49, 194 pp. Kostache, Irina D., and Clare Kunny, eds. Academics, Artists, and Museums: 21 st -Century Partnerships. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2019, hardback £120, paperback £36.99, ebook £40.49, 204 pp. Quinn, Therese, about Museums, Culture, and Justice to Explore in Your Classroom, New York: Teachers College Press, 2020, hardback $75, paperback $24.95, ebook $19.96, 95 pp. [Amazon UK £81.95, £27.50, £18.68]

This article attempts to shed light on the complex interdependencies between science, art and popular visual culture in the context of nineteenth-century natural history museums. Natural history museums are still underestimated agents for (artistic) scientific visualizations. Built as ‘visual narrators’ they became a form of mass media that conveyed scientific knowledge to diverse audiences. This article is a first attempt to bring order into the broad field of science visualization and to describe its significance for the popularization of the natural sciences. The visual outreach of museums such as the Natural History Museum Vienna went far beyond their circle of visitors. By creating and presenting first rank artistic imaginaries, they inspired highly circulated teaching devices such as school wall charts, textbooks or models, thus influencing our collective visual memory. These images subconsciously shaped the way we perceive the world as it is and as it could have been.

For the first half of the nineteenth century, objects in the British Museum were largely unlabeled, uncatalogued, and unexplained. Nevertheless, the idea that the object could evoke a ‘larger world’ was current in discussions of the pedagogical use of the museum. The popular understanding of the museum as a place of education foregrounded the idea that engagement with the thing itself, rather than any wider context or paratext, was enough to allow access to an object’s ‘realm of significance’ (Bennett, 1994), which was figured as Absolute Truth in Kantian terms embedded within each museum object. The fantasy of knowledge that could be gained from a mere glimpse reached its heights in the feats of identification and reconstruction performed by naturalists of the period like Georges Cuvier or Richard Owen. It encouraged the conception of the museum encounter as an act of instantaneous imaginative reconstruction, in which the fragmentary or uncontextualized part could be reassembled into an ideal, accurate whole. This attitude can still be seen in today’s responses to palaeoart, a discipline heavily associated with the experience of natural history museums which proposes to evoke a world to which its practitioners have only very partial access. With dinosaur palaeoart as its chief case study, thinking in particular about Owen and Waterhouse Hawkins's famous Crystal Palace dinosaurs (1854) and Ann Coates's rather less famous children's book about them (1970), this essay stresses the tenuous relationship between interpretation and reality. It argues that the universal truth implicitly promised by the museum encounter is deceptive, but also that there is a virtue in acknowledging the creativity which underpins these impressions of a world beyond the self.

This article argues that museum exhibitions often are formed through multiple layers. It presents readings of two contrasting exhibition narratives, the ethnographic display at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo and the national history exhibition at Lillehammer Museum. While the latter speaks about the national self, the museum in Oslo addresses the nation’s radical other. Despite this contrasting thematic focus, they have much in common. As centres for research and dissemination of knowledge, they are connected to the development of the academic disciplines of history and anthropology. This evolution with its shifts and ruptures are visible as traces, or layers, in the exhibitions. We argue that such multi-layered museum exhibitions may be understood as intersections of shifting disciplinary knowledge regimes, curatorial practices, and concrete political agendas. Such layers may appear as unintended subtexts that often create a sense of ‘unsettlement’ within museum exhibitions. ‘Permanent Displays’ as Unsettling Layers of Epistemologies, Politics and Aesthetics

Currently, ethnographic collections are at the center of a debate about the new meaning of museum collections, which questions the actuality of the preserved material culture. These issues also refer to the promotion of otherness and protagonism of the ‘collected people’ in museums, which trigger the interest of both researchers and indigenous people. The same is happening with the collections of the Amerindian Katxuyana. These collections count more than 700 objects collected by different expeditions at different moments in time and the collections have been preserved for more than 50 years in European and Brazilian museums. Despite this long timespan the objects are material records from everyday life, rituals and festive moments, and they reveal a little about the life of this people in the first half of the twentieth century. Some parts of these collections have been the source of dialogical experiences between researchers and Katxuyana in order to evoke memories and knowledge. This paper describe a bit about this course of approximation between Katxuyana and the collections.

In October 2018, the Aga Khan Museum was invited to contribute to the conference ‘Properties of Things: Collective Knowledge and Objects of the Museum’, sponsored by Ryerson and Mount Allison Universities. The event was conceived to throw an innovative, and intellectually bold, multidisciplinary spotlight onto curatorship within a museum context, and to engender discussions around the multifarious ways in which objects might be re-considered, re-contextualised, and re-interpreted for the benefit of and in line with the interests of a broad, contemporary public. What follows is a summary of the conceptual considerations and questions that underpinned the workshop explorations the Museum devised for four distinct display contexts: the Bellerive Room, the Permanent Collection Gallery, and two temporary exhibitions on show at the time: ‘Emperors and Jewels – Treasures of the Indian Courts from the Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait’ and ‘Transforming Traditions,’ an exploration of the arts ofnineteenth-century Iran.

This study investigates the relationship between playable, interactive games onoriginal hardware and the representation of game culture using the case of theexhibition GameOn 2.0, often considered to be the largest exhibition of digitalgames in the West so far. Qualitative interviews with museum staff were usedin order to elicit their perspective on the relationship between playability andcontextualization. Our results suggest that play as a way of engaging with gamesas museum objects has limitations which make it necessary to add other meansof contextualization in order to afford critical engagement with digital games ascultural heritage. Play excludes visitors who lack necessary gaming skills as wellas many genres of games which need longer or different kinds of interaction thana museum can allow for in the context of an exhibition. Moreover, we show that notall games can be exhibited in the same way and that we need to adapt exhibitionstrategies to individual games and their properties and contexts.

On 22 May 2017, a homemade bomb was detonated in the foyer of Manchester Arena as people were leaving the Ariana Grande concert. Twenty-three people (including the bomber) were killed and over 800 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, co-designed by the author with Manchester Art Gallery staff, 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, which offered a perspective of cultural remembrance that is driven by a focus on process, rather than permanence. 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.

This article examines tourists’ experiences of visiting the Tomsk Memorial Museum of Political Repression. Through a semiological reading of the exhibitions and textual analysis of visitor books, I show how despite the museum’s proclaimed purpose as a place of remembrance , tourists frame their visits in terms of education and entertainment. Referring to memory as a discursive practice, I demonstrate how the exhibition does not fit the dominant patriotic discourse , wherein actors are remembered for their contributions to the Motherland. Because those killed in Gulags are represented as victims rather than heroes, their story remains insignificant and immemorable to many Russians.

The Africa Museum in Tervuren, Brussels, reopened its doors after a closure of five years. What precisely is on view in the refurbished museum? And how do the choices made by the museum relate to wider discussions in anthropology and museology on decolonization and repatriation? In Belgium, it seems, working towards cooperation between all parties involved is far from finished.

This essay explores five exhibitions created for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Artmobile, the first mobile art museum in the United States. The mission of the Artmobile was to bring works of art directly to citizens throughout the state of Virginia from 1953 to 1994. In analyzing educational and exhibition materials, such as exhibition booklets, audio guide recordings, press releases, and speeches, this research examines the educational philosophies of each exhibition in relation to contemporaneous museum education literature. Applying Tony Bennett’s analysis of the impact of culture on the social to the creation of educational philosophies, this essay argues that while the mission of the Artmobile remained constant, there was a shift in the educational objective from the development of cultured citizens through art appreciation and the improvement of public taste to fostering individual visual literacy and encouraging visitors to make art historical and personal connections.

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This introduction lays out this special issue, which juxtaposes articles on approaches to provenance research, conducted at German museum and university institutions, with articles on past, present and future potentialities of restitutions to originating societies in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Namibia. In doing so, the issue makes the argument that provenance research and processes of restitution, and their underlying ethical and sensitive considerations, generate, rather than restrict, new knowledge. They are brimming with epistemic and ontological potentialities: for the people related to the material entities concerned, for the (anthropological) knowledge about them, and for the institutions involved. The ultimate goal pursued is the establishment and further development of provenance research and processes of restitution as ethnographic work and an integral dimension of ethnographic museums in the 21st century.

The field of museum education is continually examining and reconsidering how best to engage child audiences, offering child-centered experiences to complement knowledge-rich environments. The implementation of Reggio Emilia approach-based programs and activities, which embrace children’s multiple literacies and provide opportunities for free, unstructured play, are best served when complemented by documentation in order to render learning visible to all audiences. It is through documentation that we can actively demonstrate our respect and value for children’s learning and play. Play has to be honoured and celebrated in its own right, and the act of documentation needs to be incorporated into daily operations so it becomes a natural part of the museum experience, and a natural part of evaluation practices. The Royal Alberta Museum has recently undergone a large-scale renewal project; staff sought inspiration from these Reggio Emilia-based philosophies in designing a space that will welcome play and value it as learning, reframing the museum educator’s role as one that documents, collects and curates children’s learning experiences on the gallery floor. In this way, our museum will continue to shape the visitor experience in a ways that place children’s contributions at the forefront – in the way that Elee Kirk imagined.

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 child-centred 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 drawing-elicitation. 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 analysed 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.

The editorial provides a framework for considering the museum as organization and its implications for methods.This special issue contains seven empirically driven contributions to provoke further examination of the museum as organization.

Change is highly valued within the museum sector and related literatures. Despite this emphasis, it is claimed that the field struggles to adequately understand and explain change processes, and that new critical and methodological tools are needed to move discussion forward (Peacock 2013). This paper offers one possible route by developing an anthropologically informed, ethnographic approach to studying the museum as organization. Illustrated through selected empirical materials from the case of the refurbishment of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, the paper focuses on a period immediately following this major capital project. It argues that change is implemented and sustained by the many different players and practices constituting the inner life-worlds of museums as organizations. By analysing the mediatory capacities of, what in some frameworks might be considered, ‘mundane’ everyday activities (such as maintenance work and tour-guiding) the paper seeks to expand understandings of what shapes the dynamics of change in museums.

This article addresses the question of how to go beyond the conceptualisation of museums as islands in museum ethnography without losing the ethnographic depth and insights that such research can provide. Discussing existing ethnographic research in museums, the ethnographic turn in organization studies, and methodological innovation that seeks to go beyond bounded locations in anthropology, we offer a new museum methodology that retains ethnography’s capacity to grasp the often overlooked workings of organizational life – such as the informal relations, uncodified activities, chance events and feelings – while also avoiding ‘methodological containerism’, that is, the taking of the museum as an organization for granted. We then present a project design for a multi-sited, multi-linked, multi-researcher ethnography to respond to this; together with its specific realisation as the Making Differences project currently underway on Berlin’s Museum Island. Drawing on three sub-projects of this large ethnography – concerned with exhibition-making in the Museum of Islamic Art, in the Ethnological Museum in preparation for the Humboldt Forum (a high profile and contested cultural development due to open in 2019) and a new exhibition about Berlin, also for the Humboldt Forum – we highlight the importance of what happens beyond the ‘container,’ the discretion of what we even take to be the ‘container’, and how ‘organization-ness’ of various kinds is ‘done’ or ‘achieved’. We do this in part through an analysis of organigrams at play in our research fields, showing what these variously reveal, hide and suggest. Understanding museums, and organizations more generally, in this way, we argue, brings insight both to some of the specific developments that we are analysing as well as to museum and organization studies more widely.

From digital video to software-driven installations, digital art is now present in museums around the world. Museum systems designed for object-based collections like paintings and sculpture do not address the collections management and conservation requirements for these new technologies and their associated hardware. In this article the authors investigate processes through which digital art becomes embedded in museums. Based on original research conducted at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, we argue that the introduction of digital art to MoMA did not lead, as recent literature suggests, to disruptive or radical changes of existing institutional practices. Instead, the result has been organizational subunit proliferation and adjustments to established practices and procedures. Through our study of managing digital art at MoMA, we engage Science and Technology Studies and the institutional analysis tradition in the sociology of organizations to advance the understanding of processes of change in art museums.

This temporary exhibition at Kulturforum, part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, presented a selection of around 200 objects from its collection, alongside loans from prominent cultural institutions, including the Getty Research Institute in California with whom they have collaborated. In 2016, the Institute itself ran an exhibition entitled The Art of Alchemy which appears to have laid out the curatorial objectives for this recent show.

Nearly two million visitors a year will pass through the new permanent galleries of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. This article reflects on the planning and collecting that presaged their redevelopment in the context of twenty-first century museum practice in the UK. We focus in particular on two elements: firstly, the fundamental project management work that underpins any development of this kind. Were established methodologies and practices conducive to open-ended, outcomes-based objectives such as research? Secondly, we ask this question specifically in relation to contemporary collecting in art, and in science. How can the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns of contemporary collecting be mainstreamed in project management workflows? What boundaries endure in museum processes and products? Publisher PDF

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Dorfman, E. (ed.) The Future of Natural History Museums , Routledge, paperback, £31.99, pp. 268.

Facebook has often been hailed for affording participation and thus for representing an opportunity for institutions to interact with the public. However, research concerning how institutions are actualizing this communicative opportunity is still scarce. In this article, we seek to address this gap by investigating empirically how one type of institution, namely museums, and their Facebook followers, actually communicate. Our approach is innovative in combining analytical tools from speech act theory and Conversation Analysis (CA) to a corpus of activities from the Facebook pages of nine Danish museums of different types and sizes collected during eight consecutive weeks in 2013. This approach enables us to both investigate communicative actions as isolated speech acts and the micromechanics of the interaction that potentially arise from these actions. Our findings indicate that certain kinds of speech act are used more than others and that certain speech acts lead to more interaction than others. By analyzing a fairly standard example of museum/follower interaction, we show how different kinds of micro conversational dynamics play out. In light of this analysis, we ask what modes of participation the interaction affords and we discuss the implications of our findings for recent debates about how museums can adapt to the participatory paradigm underlying institutional Facebook communication.Key Words: Social media communication, Facebook, speech acts, conversation analysis,institutional communication, museums

This article examines how museum work is evaluated, and how it affects museum professionals’ identities. The empirical material consists of biographical interviews of Finnish museum professionals. The key concept for the analysis is ‘museum people’, which represents the ideal museum workers. As a community of practice ‘museum people’ are defined by what they do – ‘proper’ museum work. Analyzing the defining practices and elements of the community also reveals that it is placed in a time and space of its own. Reflecting oneself to ‘museum people’ and their practices can be elemental for the identity work of a museum professional. This article examines how museum work is evaluated, and how it affects museum professionals’ identities. The empirical material consists of biographical interviews of Finnish museum professionals. The key concept for the analysis is ‘museum people’, which represents the ideal museum workers. As a community of practice ‘museum people’ are defined by what they do – ‘proper’ museum work. Analyzing the defining practices and elements of the community also reveals that it is placed in a time and space of its own. Reflecting oneself to ‘museum people’ and their practices can be elemental for the identity work of a museum professional.

Museums have several means of communicating with their audiences. The problems discussed here concern how local museums interact with their audience when the past they want to portray is multiple, complex and sometimes disputed. It is based on an analysis of three exhibitions in local museums situated in a region where archaeological findings indicate that the South Sámi have been present since the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age. It highlights the various ways in which the pluralistic past in the region is being portrayed by asking whether its history appears as neutralized, i.e. transmitted in passive impartial terms, or is exoticized, repressed or mediated through other images. The one common identity marker the three exhibitions share, although portrayed in different ways and with different effects, is the gåetie, a turf hut in common use in the South Sámi region. A tendency to neutralize the multiple and complex past in the South Sámi region takes place, either by operating in a form of ‘timeless past‘ or by referring to a shared ‘far away past‘ as fishers and hunters. By barely mentioning cultural encounters, the South Sámi and the Norse are primarily presented as ethnic groups who have lived isolated and independent of each other.Key words: disputed heritage; identity markers; South Sámi; perceptions of the past; museum exhibitions

In the last five to ten years, several science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) museums have been experimenting with new forms of public engagement, aiming to be places for curiosity-driven investigation of the cultures of science via multiple perspectives, bringing artists, scientists, researchers, clinicians, members of the public and others together. Yet these diverse and rapidly evolving sites lack a clear definition of their family resemblances – something we argue is crucial for better understanding, advocating, and evaluating what they do. As a starting point for this definitional project we propose ‘the house’ as a metaphor and framing device for public engagement in STEM museums, grounded in experiences at Medical Museion in Denmark and Wellcome Collection in the UK. We further suggest that a Goldilocks principle – the notion of lying between two poles of a continuum in a ‘just right’ position – captures several key features of what it is about the idea of a house that resonates with the approach to public engagement in these museums.Key words: STEM museums, science communication, public engagement, house.

This article is a case study of a newly opened exhibition at one of the most significant lieux de mémoire in Norway, the historic house museum Eidsvoll House. Eidsvoll House has, since 1814, played a key role in Norwegian stateand nation-building narratives and continues to do so today. The article explores the tenacity of national narratives by investigating the role museums play in contemporary nation-building processes. It particularly looks at attempts to integrate domestic servants into this dominant and controlling narrative, and investigates the complex relationship between social history, national narratives and museum communication strategies. It problematizes the exhibition strategy, popular at historic houses, of recreating the past at a specific juncture of time and argues that such an approach might help to reaffirm social hierarchies. On a more general level, the article aims to contribute to a productive exchange between academic and museum approaches to history.

In the establishment of people’s lifestyles, places, and especially cities, havebecome central arenas for display and consumption, and have become part ofthe aesthetic experience itself. These changes have affected the composition ofcultural capital, which may have then taken an urban dimension. Art museumvisitors, often associated with highbrow culture, constitute an excellent case studyto explore the links between cultural capital and place. Based on a survey of 1900visitors of the six main museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium,this article will focus on the distribution of the audience characterized by theircultural tastes and activities across the Belgian territory (through their postcodes).It shows that visitors mainly come from areas with high and moderate densityand that the socio-demographic but also urban characteristics of their place ofresidence can be related to the way visitors’ cultural capital is composed. Yet,it also suggests that places like cities (just like museums) form meeting places,in which co-exist and interact different stories, different trajectories and, as thisarticle shows, a multiplicity of lifestyles.Keywords: Museum visitors; Pierre Bourdieu; cultural capital; audiences; Belgium.

The exhibition Masterpieces of Korean Art, which toured 8 cities in the US from December 1957 to June 1959, was the first large-scale overseas exhibition of Korean cultural objects that the South Korean government organized. This overseas exhibition in the US was designed to secure a cultural identity for South Korea on the world stage by explaining to US citizens that Korean culture has peculiar characteristics and independence from Chinese or Japanese culture. It was in the same context that the South Korean government was trying to secure a place within the world order controlled by the US. This touring exhibition shows that, through this exhibition, the National Museum of Korea was engaged in a dual mission to both gain cultural citizenship on the world stage and, reflexively, to internalize this for internal consumption so as to consolidate a sense of Korean cultural identity at home.