The Museum And Society

Gathering contributions from experts with backgrounds in art history, museology, the museum profession and social science, this text explores the various roles that museums have played in the creation of cultural identities. The phrase museum and society can no longer be regarded as simply a matter of the museum and its social context. The contributors put the case that there is a museum aspect to many contemporary social issues, including national identity, disability and social exclusion. They also argue that, historically, cultural identities were partly forged at the museum. The book reflects on what is seen to be a new intimacy between museum practice and social science as museums increasingly take on a role as agents of social change, and reveals how this development is enhancing our understanding of issues such as heritage, museum marketing, social inclusion and ethnicity. It also argues that museum research is leading to new interdisciplinary perspectives on society.

Museums and the Past explores the central role of museums as memory keepers and makers. Using case studies from a Canadian context, the contributors to this collection reflect on the challenges in maintaining and developing museums as meaningful places of memory and learning. Discussions of museum practice and historical consciousness – how our understanding of the past shapes our sense of the future – consider the modern museum’s narratives and pedagogical responsibilities and how museums continue to inform our sense of history.

Museums, Society, Inequality explores the wide-ranging social roles and responsibilities of the museum. It brings together international perspectives to stimulate critical debate, inform the work of practitioners and policy makers, and to advance recognition of the purpose, responsibilities and value to society of museums. Museums, Society, Inequality examines the issues and: offers different understandings of the social agency of the museum presents ways in which museums have sought to engage with social concerns, and instigate social change imagines how museums might become more useful to society in future. This book is essential for all museum academics, practitioners and students.

A Companion to Museum Studies captures the multidisciplinary approach to the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society. Collects first-rate original essays by leading figures from a range of disciplines and theoretical stances, including anthropology, art history, history, literature, sociology, cultural studies, and museum studies Examines the complexity of the museum from cultural, political, curatorial, historical and representational perspectives Covers traditional subjects, such as space, display, buildings, objects and collecting, and more contemporary challenges such as visiting, commerce, community and experimental exhibition forms

Using case studies drawn from all areas of museum studies, Museums and their Communities explores the museums as a site of representation, identity and memory, and considers how it can influence its community. Focusing on the museum as an institution, and its social and cultural setting, Sheila Watson examines how museums use their roles as informers and educators to empower, or to ignore, communities. Looking at the current debates about the role of the museum, she considers contested values in museum functions and examines provision, power, ownership, responsibility, and institutional issues. This book is of great relevance for all disciplines as it explores and questions the role of the museum in modern society.

Museums, Society, Inequality explores the wide-ranging social roles and responsibilities of the museum. It brings together diverse international perspectives from across the globe, which collectively seek to stimulate critical debate, to inform the work of practitioners and policy makers, and to advance recognition of the agency of museums. This unusual collection gives valuable insight on the museum's relationship to the outside community, and its essential role as a social institution that influences, and must respond to, the changing characteristics and concerns of society.

Few perspectives have invigorated the development of critical museum studies over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as much as Foucault’s account of the relations between knowledge and power and their role in processes of governing. Within this literature, Tony Bennett’s work stands out as having marked a series of strategic engagements with Foucault’s work to offer a critical genealogy of the public museum, offering an account of its nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century development that has been constantly alert to the politics of museums in the present. Museums, Power, Knowledge brings together new research with a set of essays initially published in diverse contexts, making available for the first time the full range of Bennett’s critical museology. Ranging across natural history, anthropological art, geological and history museums and their precursors in earlier collecting institutions, and spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries in discussing museum practices in Britain, Australia, the USA, France and Japan, it offers a compelling account of the shifting political logics of museums over the modern period. As a collection that aims to bring together the ‘signature’ work of a museum theorist and historian whose work has long occupied a distinctive place in museum/society debates, Museums, Power, Knowledge will be of interest to researchers, teachers and students working in the fields of museum and heritage studies, cultural history, cultural studies and sociology, as well as museum professionals and museum visitors.