Making Military Histories in Museums Editorial Introduction (original) (raw)
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From history to reality – engaging with visitors in the Imperial War Museum (North)
Museum Management and Curatorship, 2013
This paper explores visitor management in a modern museum, focussing on the case study of the Imperial War Museum (North). Visitor management issues have an increasingly important significance in ensuring the smooth delivery of a museum's core aims and in ensuring accessibility, both physical and intellectual, to all as part of the widening participation agenda, and managing visitors and their needs is of paramount importance. The idea of what the role
The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum
2020
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org The Open Access book is available at www.degruyter.com Knowledge Unlatched ForP riya Acknowledgements This book is the resultofmore than nine years of research into the narrativesand representations of war and history museums, which originated in the summers of 2009 and 2010.While visitingm useums in Berlin, London, Warsaw, and Kraków and looking for patterns in representations of the Second World Warindifferent historiographical media, Ib ecame fascinated with visitors'' readings' of museum space in contrast to readerso ft ext and viewers of film. Ir ealized the potential in using aesthetica nd narratological reading techniques to analyze the reception of exhibitions as well as the constructive and performative nature of collective memories. This eventuallyled me to conductfieldwork in 157 different museums and independent exhibitions on both of the world wars, the Holocaust and otherg enocides, human rights, wara nd military history,a nd some more general history museums and exhibitions. These exhibitions werel ocated in fifteen countries,and the fieldwork was conducted between July 2010 and August 2019. The research for this book was generouslys upported through an Insight Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and through several internal grants facilitated by the Universityo fM anitoba. This book would not have been written in this form without the help of an umber of people. This includes curators and staff in the various museums in which I conducted my field research. Iwould like particularlytothank Gorch Pieken, Andrea Ulke, MonikaB ednarek, Klaus Hesse, Thomas Lutz, Dean Oliver, Jeff Noakes,M élanie Morin-Pelletier,a nd Anna Mulleri nt his regard. All twelve corem useums analyzed in this book wereg raciouslyw illing to assist me with numerous questions and allowed for the reproduction of photographs from their exhibitions. Ip resented ideas that made it into this book at around twenty conferences and guest lectures, and in doing so receivedvaluable feedback from discussants and anonymouspeerreviewers of my museum research. The ideas receivedover the years from the German Studies Association (GSA) "Wara nd Violence" interdisciplinary network, which Ico-chaired between 2013 and 2017,wereinvaluable. Ia lso cannot thank my colleagues enough at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the Universität Trier,wheree ach Is pent long spans of my year-long research leave in 2017-2018 and found the quiet and inspiration to finallyw rite the majority of this manuscript.Aparticular thanks goes to Sabine Gross,M arc Silberman, WolfgangK looß, Ralf Hertel, and Herbert Uerlings. It would be impossible to name all of my colleagues, friends, and family members who helped enable the completion of this project.I np articular, I OpenAccess. ©2 020 Stephan Jaeger,p ublished by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeC ommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
Exhibiting the War; Approaches to World War II in museums and exhibitions
Historizing the Uses of the Past, editors: Helle Bjerg, Claudia Lenz, Erik Thorstensen , 2011
Traditionally, war exhibitions have functioned as media for officially sanctioned narratives of sacrifice and victory. After World War II another kind of exhibitions has developed, balancing between moral messages and research based narratives. What does this development mean for museums‘ role in shaping historical consciousness?
War Museums as Agonistic Spaces: Possibilities, Opportunities and Constraints
of the Director, Manuel Borja-Villel, in establishing 'a new model of what a museum should be' (102), yet a Director is only one actor in a wide array of stakeholders with a direct interest in and decision-making power over museums. Furthermore, Mouffe suggests that a museum has traditionally had an educational function -admittedly, for the 'construction of bourgeois hegemony' (101) -which has been supplemented by a consumerist function but which can nevertheless be re-established in a new counter-hegemonic guise. However, museums engage in a much wider range of functions than just as educators and entertainers. For instance, they participate in processes of memorialisation and reconciliation (Apsel 2016). They also often attempt to negotiate divisive memories of the past, both at the national and international levels. As Sharon Macdonald remarked, we are witnessing 'an internationalisation of how memory is performed ' (2016, 19). Museums also play a role in states' cultural diplomacy and soft power, an area where supranational institutions like the EU have started to become involved (Clarke, Cento Bull and Deganutti, 2017).
From military museum to remembrance museum - Finding a balance
Resetting the post-colonial perspectives is becoming a dominant discourse within cultural heritage. It goes beyond questions like: Are all communities equally represented in the museum? But is more closely focused on issues like; Are museums currently creating and maintaining a feeling of disharmony?, and How to tell the contested narratives of colonial and post-colonial times in such a way that we can open up the dialogue instead of excluding? In other words: how narratives and collections of nation and identity can influence the level of harmony in society. This paper presents an analysis of the exhibition called 'The Story of the Dutch East Indies'. This exhibition was developed in 2009 as a collaboration between The Military Museum Bronbeek and the Indisch Herrinneringscentrum, and is shown on the Estate Bronbeek. Two very different stakeholder-groups, the Indisch Herinneringscentrum representing the Indies community, and Museum Bronbeek representing the veterans and the ministry of defense, placed under one roof challenged to tell their stories as one.
Motivations and Experiences of Museum Visitors: The Case of the Imperial War Museum, United Kingdom
Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, 2015
This study explores motivations of visitors to the Imperial War Museum (North and South), United Kingdom, with a view to understanding why people visit museums associated with conflicts. Though museums are part of the education and leisure industry, the distinction between education and leisure is often blurred. There are a number of reasons why people visit museums. Motives of museum visitors can be grouped into intrinsic and extrinsic factors. This study analysed the extent to which museum visitors are motivated by extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Semi-structured interviews with visitors were conducted w at the Imperial Museum of War (North and South), United Kingdom. The findings do establish that extrinsic motivations are more dominant than the intrinsic ones for visiting the Imperial War Museum. The importance of extrinsic factors in motivating museum visitors would suggest that providing an opportunity for a good day out has more appeal to the visitors than the collections in the museum for the average visitors. The experiencing of museum in its totality is more important than the individual collections or the theme of the museum to the mainstream visitor. This work has made a contribution to understanding visitor motivations, which are multi-facetted, complex and not necessarily fully understood by the visitors themselves.