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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.
In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors. Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture. Using Foucaltian perspectives The Birth of the Museum explores how the public museum should be understood not just as a place of instruction, but as a reformatory of manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances take place. This invigorating study enriches and challenges the understanding of the museum, and places it at the centre of modern relations between culture and government. For students of museum, cultural and sociology studies, this will be an asset to their reading list.
Museum planners Gail Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg demonstrate how museums and cities are using their soft power to address some of the most important issues of our time.Soft power is the exercise of influence through attraction, persuasion, and agenda-setting rather than military or economic coercion.Thirteen of the world's leading museum and cultural experts from six continents explore the many facets of soft power in cities and museums to include: how it amplifies civic discourse, accelerates cultural change, and contributes to contextual intelligence among the great diversity of city dwellers, visitors, and policy makers. The authors urge city governments to embrace museums which so often are the signifiers of their cities, increasing real estate values while attracting investment, tourists, and creative workers. Lord and Blankenberg propose 32 practical strategies for museums and cities to activate their soft power and create thriving and sustainable communities. Follow the link below to watch co-author Gail Lord speaking about soft power on The Agenda, a popular public affairs program on TVO, a leading educational television broadcaster http://tvo.org/video/programs/the-agenda-with-steve-paikin/a-cultural-sleeping-giant. To Read More: http://tvo.org/article/current-affairs/shared-values/how-museums-help-cities-realize-their-soft-power
Museums have been active in shaping knowledge over the last six hundred years. Yet what is their function within today's society? At the present time, when funding is becoming increasingly scarce, difficult questions are being asked about the justification of museums. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge presents a critical survey of major changes in current assumptions about the nature of museums. Through the examination of case studies, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill reveals a variety of different roles for museums in the production and shaping of knowledge. Today, museums are once again organising their spaces and collections to present themselves as environments for experimental and self-directed learning.
Only a decade ago, the notion that museums, galleries and heritage organisations might engage in activist practice, with explicit intent to act upon inequalities, injustices and environmental crises, was met with scepticism and often derision. Seeking to purposefully bring about social change was viewed by many within and beyond the museum community as inappropriately political and antithetical to fundamental professional values. Today, although the idea remains controversial, the way we think about the roles and responsibilities of museums as knowledge based, social institutions is changing. Museum Activism examines the increasing significance of this activist trend in thinking and practice. At this crucial time in the evolution of museum thinking and practice, this ground-breaking volume brings together more than fifty contributors working across six continents to explore, analyse and critically reflect upon the museum’s relationship to activism. Including contributions from practitioners, artists, activists and researchers, this wide-ranging examination of new and divergent expressions of the inherent power of museums as forces for good, and as activists in civil society, aims to encourage further experimentation and enrich the debate in this nascent and uncertain field of museum practice. Museum Activism elucidates the largely untapped potential for museums as key intellectual and civic resources to address inequalities, injustice and environmental challenges. This makes the book essential reading for scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics. It will be a source of inspiration to museum practitioners and museum leaders around the globe.
Conn's study includes familiar places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Academy of Natural Sciences, but he also draws attention to forgotten ones, like the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, once the repository for objects from many turn-of-the-century world's fairs. What emerges from Conn's analysis is that museums of all kinds shared a belief that knowledge resided in the objects themselves. Using what Conn has termed "object-based epistemology," museums of the late nineteenth century were on the cutting edge of American intellectual life. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, museums had largely been replaced by research-oriented universities as places where new knowledge was produced. According to Conn, not only did this mean a change in the way knowledge was conceived, but also, and perhaps more importantly, who would have access to it.
In Learning at the Museum Frontiers, Viv Golding argues that the museum has the potential to function as a frontier – a zone where learning is created, new identities are forged and new connections made between disparate groups and their own histories. She draws on a range of theoretical perspectives including Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, Foucauldian discourse on space and power, and postcolonial and Black feminist theory, as well as her own professional experience in museum education over a ten-year period, applying these ideas to a wide range of museum contexts. The book offers an important theoretical and empirical contribution to the debate on the value of museums and what they can contribute to society. The author reveals the radical potential for museums to tackle injustice and social exclusion, challenge racism, enhance knowledge and promote truth.
In this broadly conceived study Steven Conn examines the development of American museums across the twentieth century with a historian's attention and a critic's eye. He focuses on an array of museum types and asks illuminating questions about the relationship between museums and American cultural life.