Re-Imagining the Museum

Re-Imagining the Museum
Author: Andrea Witcomb
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2003-08-29
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1134598882

Re-Imagining the Museum presents new interpretations of museum history and contemporary museum practices. Through a range of case studies from the UK, North America and Australia, Andrea Witcomb moves away from the idea that museums are always 'conservative' to suggest they have a long history of engaging with popular culture and addressing a variety of audiences. She argues that museums are key mediators between high and popular culture and between government, media practitioners, cultural policy-makers and museums professionals. Analyzing links between museums and the media, looking at the role of museums in cities, and discussing the effects on museums of cultural policies, Re-Imagining the Museum presents a vital tool in the study of museum practice.

Re-imagining the Museum

Re-imagining the Museum
Author: Andrea Witcomb
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2003
Genre: Cultural policy
ISBN: 0415220998

Interdisciplinary in approach, this book presents new interpretations of museum history and practices. Engaging with a variety of commentators, the text discusses museums in terms of their relationship with the media and their role in modern society.

Re-imagining the Museum

Re-imagining the Museum
Author: Andrea Witcomb
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2003
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 041522098X

Interdisciplinary in approach, this book presents new interpretations of museum history and practices. Engaging with a variety of commentators, the text discusses museums in terms of their relationship with the media and their role in modern society.

Controversy in Science Museums

Controversy in Science Museums
Author: Erminia Pedretti
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2020-04-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429017758

Controversy in Science Museums focuses on exhibitions that approach sensitive or controversial topics. With a keen sense of past and current practices, Pedretti and Navas Iannini examine and re-imagine how museums and science centres can create exhibitions that embrace criticality and visitor agency. Drawing on international case studies and voices from visitors and museum professionals, as well as theoretical insights about scientific literacy and science communication, the authors explore the textured notion of controversy and the challenges and opportunities practitioners may encounter as they plan for and develop controversial science exhibitions. They assert that science museums can no longer serve as mere repositories for objects or sites for transmitting facts, but that they should also become spaces for conversations that are inclusive, critical, and socially responsible. Controversy in Science Museums provides an invaluable resource for museum professionals who are interested in creating and hosting controversial exhibitions, and for scholars and students working in the fields of museum studies, science communication, and social studies of science. Anyone wishing to engage in an examination and critique of the changing roles of science museums will find this book relevant, timely, and thought provoking.

Reimagining Museums for Climate Action

Reimagining Museums for Climate Action
Author: Rodney Harrison
Publisher: Museums for Climate Action
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1739971515

This book is not a typical academic edited volume. Nor does it subscribe to the usual dictates of an exhibition catalogue. It does not seek to provide a comprehensive overview of work on climate change and museums or claim to have discovered One Quick Trick to Solve the Climate Emergency. Instead, the book reflects the main characteristics of the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project: it is collaborative, distributed, conversational, subversive, nomadic and, at times, playful. The arguments it puts forward emerge through dialogue and speculation just as much as they respond to and build on empirical research. In this sense, the book is perhaps best seen as a partial and in many ways still evolving artefact of the Reimagining Museums project. It can be read from cover-to-cover, or its varied contents can be traversed in a less rigid fashion. It is one “output” among many, and its main aim is to prompt further transdisciplinary alliances, rather than set out a particular position or manifesto. To this end, the book invites peripatetic readings and strange deviations. It is anchored by eight concepts that reflect the diversity and creativity of museums, but it is also motivated by a desire to (re)situate this field within a broader set of debates on the roots of social and environmental injustice, and the role of museums in these histories.

Re-imagining Ireland

Re-imagining Ireland
Author: Andrew Higgins Wyndham
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780813925448

Accompanying DVD is a videorecording of the television program produced by Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Paul Wagner Productions in association with Radio Telefís Éireann, and originally broadcast in 2004.

Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation

Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation
Author: Dr Russell Staiff
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1472407350

This book challenges traditional approaches to heritage interpretation and offers an alternative theoretical architecture to the current research and practice. Russell Staiff suggests that the dialogue between visitors and heritage places has been too focused on learning outcomes, and so heritage interpretation has become dominated by psychology and educational theory, and over-reliant on outdated thinking. Using his background as an art historian and experience teaching heritage and tourism courses, Russell Staiff weaves personal observation with theory in an engaging and lively way. He recognizes that the 'digital revolution' has changed forever the way that people interact with their environment and that a new approach is needed.

The Great Reimagining

The Great Reimagining
Author: Bree T. Hocking
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2015-02-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 178238622X

While sectarian violence has greatly diminished on the streets of Belfast and Derry, proxy battles over the right to define Northern Ireland’s identity through its new symbolic landscapes continue. Offering a detailed ethnographic account of Northern Ireland’s post-conflict visual transformation, this book examines the official effort to produce new civic images against a backdrop of ongoing political and social struggle. Interviews with politicians, policymakers, community leaders, cultural workers, and residents shed light on the deeply contested nature of seemingly harmonized urban landscapes in societies undergoing radical structural change. Here, the public art process serves as a vital means to understanding the wider politics of a transforming public sphere in an age of globalization and transnational connectivity.

Re-imagining the Modern American West

Re-imagining the Modern American West
Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1996-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780816516834

Describes changes in how the West has been seen, from a male-dominated frontier, to a region with a powerful sense of place, to a modern center of both genders, ethnic groups, and environmental interests

Museum Activism

Museum Activism
Author: Robert R. Janes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2019-01-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351251023

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.