Message, K 2007, 'Museums and the Utility of Culture: The Politics of Liberal Democracy and Cultural Well-Being', Social Identities, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 235-256. (original) (raw)
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In this essay I analyse the 'ideas ', 'philosophies', 'contexts' and 'companions' of several recent museum studies anthologies, and examine whether they respond to key issues facing museums today. I am particularly interested in how effectively these anthologies represent social inclusion and diversity discourses, how they account for outreach programs that aim to link museums and communities, and how they engage with the more general work, experience, and critical analysis of museums and museum contexts globally.
Museums and cultural institutions as spaces for Cultural Citizenship
2014
The Age of Enlightenment fostered dreams of a united humanity, building on knowledge, education, and equal access to participating in society and culture. With digital technologies, we have stepped closer to fulfilling that dream. Millions, even billions, of people across the globe are connected by the Internet, where they have access to communicating, learning, exchanging, developing, creating, and sharing with each other. Enlightened ideas remain at the core of the cultural heritage sector today. How do we embrace this unique opportunity to make our institutions and work truly support a connected world? The anthology before you is an attempt at that vast and complex question. The term 'Sharing is Caring' has caught on in a wealth of contexts, from charity projects to file sharing services. What specific meaning and value does it have in a cultural heritage context? Cultural heritage belongs to everyone. It was created by-and for-all kinds of people. The digitisation of physical heritage objects enables them to move out of storage rooms, library shelves, and file drawers, and land in the hands of the worlds' citizens. When cultural heritage is digital, there is nothing standing in the way of sharing and reusing it. It can be sampled, remixed, embedded, it can illustrate new stories and move into new media, it can adorn books, posters, and public spaces, advance research and make ideas and creativity blossom. When cultural heritage is digital, open and shareable, it becomes common property, something that is right at hand every day. It becomes a part of us. * My article has a relatively long introduction, giving an account of my professional background and specific approach to what I call 'digital museum practice' (p. 23-31). Readers, who wish to move directly to the case study examining the development of digital museum practices at Statens Museum for Kunst, are recommended to start reading on p. 31. ** A few of the illustrations carry di erent Creative Commons licenses which will show beneath the individual images. Read more about the various licenses employed in the anthology on p. 264. Thanks My warmest thanks to everyone who has contributed to making Sharing is Caring an important hub for knowledge sharing and development in the Danish cultural heritage sector. Thanks to
Museums as Agents for Social Change
Museums as Agents for Social Change, 2021
Museums as Agents for Social Change is the frst comprehensive text to examine museum practice in a decolonised moment, moving beyond known roles of object collection and presentation. Drawing on studies of Mutare Museum, a regional museum in Eastern Zimbabwe, this book considers how museums with inherited colonial legacies are dealing with their new environments. The book provides an examination of Mutare Museum's activism in engaging with topical issues afecting its surrounding community, and Chipangura and Mataga demonstrate how new forms of engagement are being deployed to attract new audiences, whilst dealing with issues such as economic livelihoods, poverty, displacement, climate change and education. Illustrating how recent programmes have helped to reposition Mutare Museum as a decolonial agent of social change and an important community anchor institution, the book also demonstrates how other museums can move beyond the colonial preoccupation with the gathering of collections, conservation and presentation of cultural heritage to the public. Museums as Agents for Social Change will primarily be of interest to academics and students working in the felds of museum and heritage studies, history, archaeology and anthropology. It should also be appealing to museum professionals around the world who are interested in learning more about how to decolonise their museum.
2008
The perpetual crisis of national museums is directly related to the character of the nation that has been considered-since the latter half of the 20 th century-as elusive, fluid, constructed and difficult to grasp. How have national museums reacted, supported, resisted or rejected political changes of the nation? What were the privileged representations of the Nation-state? And what are the ways in which these institutions are trying to come to grips with multicultural and multiethnic societies? In an attempt to shed light on these questions, this essay is constructed around the tensions and challenges that face national museums as they aim to represent both a fragmented and united community with the pressures to overcompensate past exclusions. In order to look at how national museums have responded to their contexts, and the role they are playing today, the paper will examine the case of the Museo Nacional de Colombia. This Latin American country has, in the last fifteen years, advanced greatly in terms of developing a legislation that recognizes the existence of multiple ethnicities and cultures in opposition of the well-known project of homogenization that characterized the Nation-state. Nevertheless, the reality of the communities is complex and though symbolically the 1991 Constitution has had great impact, there has been a backlash in terms of overcoming discrimination, poverty and improvement of the living conditions of marginalized groups. What then, is the role of the museum in this changed setting?
The role of museums as ‘places of social justice’
This chapter, from the edited book, ‘Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums’, examines the community consultation process that occurred at seven museums in England during the lead up to the development of exhibitions marking the British bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Museums, at this time, were faced with the opportunity of engaging with a range of community groups over how exhibitions should be framed, and the messages and meanings they should portray. Through interview material with curators and community activists and representatives, the chapter documents the issues that arose, highlighting in particular tensions between the expectations of both museum professionals and community groups.
2014
Beyond Pedagogy: Reconsidering the public purpose of museums explores issues standing at the intersection of public pedagogy, memory, and critical theory, focusing on the explicit and implicit educational imperative of art, natural history, and indigenous museums, cultural centers, memorial sites, heritage houses, and other cultural heritage sites that comprise the milieu of educating, learning, and knowing. Taken together, the various essays comprising this book demonstrate that a more nuanced examination of the role of cultural heritage institutions as pedagogical sites requires a critical gaze to understand the function of the authority and ways through which such institutions educate. Beyond Pedagogy also makes a vital point about the complexity of such institutions and the need to comprehend how pedagogy emerges not only as an end result of the museum's educational purpose but also in relation to the historically defined mandates that increasingly come to question the dist...