Museums and Photography combines a strong theoretical approach with international case studies to investigate the display of death in various types of museums-history, anthropology, art, ethnographic, and science museums - and to understand the changing role of photography in museums. Contributors explore the politics and poetics of displaying death, and more specifically, the role of photography in representing and interpreting this difficult topic. Working with nearly 20 researchers from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines, the editors critically engage the recent debate on the changing role of museums, exhibition meaning-making, and the nature of photography. They offer new ways for understanding representational practices in relation to contemporary visual culture. This book will appeal to researchers and museum professionals, inspiring new thinking about death and the role of photography in making sense of it.

Although libraries and museums for many centuries have taken the lead, under one rational or another, in recovering, storing, and displaying various kinds of culture of their periods, lately, as the gap between elite and popular culture has apparently widened, these repositories of artifacts of the present for the future have tended to drift more and more to what many people call the aesthetically pleasing elements of our culture. The degree to which our libraries and museums have ignored our culture is terrifying, when one scans the documents and artifacts of our time which, if history in any wise repeats itself, will in the immediate and distant future become valuable indices of our present culture to future generations. As Professor Schroeder dramatically states it, "No doubt about it, it is the contemporary popular culture that is the endangered species." The essays in this book investigate the reasons for present-day neglect of popular culture materials and chart the various routes by which conscientious and insightful librarians and museum directors can correct this disastrous oversight.

This handbook addresses the history, organization and central debates in the field of leisure studies. More than thirty chapters from leading international scholars are presented in five clearly defined parts. These examine the origins of leisure studies; review and evaluate the contributions and approaches to leisure studies of key social science disciplines; provide a guide to core questions in the organization of leisure that recur in the literature; consider locations and forms of leisure; and consider the key themes that run through debates as the subject has matured in a central part of the social science canon. Critically summing up the achievements of the field and providing an agenda for future debate and research, it offers an invaluable resource for students, scholars and lecturers.

In this innovative and original collection, people are seen as active agents in the development of new ways of understanding the past and creating histories for the present. Chapters explore forms of public history in which people's experience and understanding of their personal, national and local pasts are part of their current lives.

During the late twentieth century, the number of museums in the UK dramatically increased. Typically small and independent, the new museums concentrated on local history, war and transport. This book asks who founded them, how and why. In order to find out more, Fiona Candlin, a professor in museology, and Toby Butler, an expert oral historian, travelled around the UK to meet the individuals, families, community groups and special interest societies who established the museums. The rich oral histories they collected provide a new account of recent museum history - one that weaves together personal experience and social change while putting ordinary people at the heart of cultural production. Combining academic rigour with a lively writing style, Stories from small museums is essential reading for students and museum enthusiasts alike. -- .

Museums of all kinds - art, history, culture, science centers and heritage sites - are actively engaging with food through exhibitions, collections, and stories about food production, consumption, history, taste, and aesthetics. Food also plays a central role in their food courts, restaurants, cafes, gardens, and gift shops. Food and Museums is the first book to explore the diverse, complex relationship between museums and food. This edited collection features theoretical analysis from cultural historians, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and food studies scholars; interviews with museum professionals, artists and chefs; and critical case studies from a wide range of cultural institutions and museums to establish an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of the role of food in museums. Exploring the richness and complexity of sensory, cultural, social, and political significance of food today as well as in the past, the book demonstrates how food is changing the current museological landscape. A fascinating look at contemporary museums through the lens of food, this is an essential read for students and researchers in museum studies, food studies, cultural studies, and sensory studies as well as museum and food professionals.

This book makes a significant contribution to the history of placemaking, presenting grassroots to top-down practices and socially engaged, situated artistic practices and artsled spatial inquiry that go beyond instrumentalising the arts for development. The book brings together a range of scholars to critique and deconstruct the notion of creative placemaking, presenting diverse case studies from researcher, practitioner, funder and policymaker perspectives from across the globe. It opens with the creators of the 2010 White Paper that named and defined creative placemaking, Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, who offer a cortically reflexive narrative on the founding of the sector and its development. This book looks at vernacular creativity in place, a topic continued through the book with its focus on the practitioner and community-placed projects. It closes with a consideration of aesthetics, metrics and, from the editors, a consideration of the next ten years for the sector. If creative placemaking is to contribute to places-in-the-making and encourage citizenled agency, new conceptual frameworks and practical methodologies are required. This book joins theorists and practitioners in dialogue, advocating for transdisciplinary, resilient processes.

Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women's and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.

Collecting and Conserving Net Art explores the qualities and characteristics of net art and its influence on conservation practices. By addressing and answering some of the challenges facing net art and providing an exploration of its intersection with conservation, the book casts a new light on net art, conservation, curating and museum studies. Viewing net art as a process rather than as a fixed object, the book considers how this is influenced by and executed through other systems and users. Arguing that these processes and networks are imbued with ambiguity, the book suggests that this is strategically used to create suspense, obfuscate existing systems and disrupt power structures. The rapid obsolescence of hard and software, the existence of many net artworks within restricted platforms and the fact that artworks often act as assemblages that change or mutate, make net art a challenging case for conservation. Taking the performative and interpretive roles conservators play into account, the book demonstrates how practitioners can make more informed decisions when responding to, critically analysing or working with net art, particularly software-based processes. Collecting and Conserving Net Art is intended for researchers, academics and postgraduate students, especially those engaged in the study of museum studies, conservation and heritage studies, curatorial studies, digital art and art history. The book should also be interesting to professionals who are involved in the conservation and curation of digital arts, performance, media and software.

The Brain-Friendly Museum proposes an innovative approach to experiencing and enjoying the museum environment in new ways, based on the systematic application of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Providing practical guidance on navigating and thinking about museums in different ways, the book is designed to help develop more fulfilling visitor experiences. It explores our cognitive processes and emotions, and how they can be used to engage with and enjoy the museum environment, regardless of the visitor's background, language, or culture. The book considers core cognitive processes, including memory, attention, and perception, and how they can successfully be applied to the museum environment, for example, in creating more effective displays. Using evidence-based examples throughout, the book advocates for a wellbeing approach improving visitor experience, and one that is grounded in research from psychology and neuroscience. This book is a must-read for all museum practitioners and psychologists interested in the relationship between cultural heritage, psychology, and neuroscience. It will also be of great interest to art therapists, neuroscientists, university students, museum stakeholders, and museum lovers.

In the face of an increasing public interest and demand for information, archaeologists are starting to collaborate with historians, educators, interpreters, museum curators, exhibit designers, landscape architects, and other cultural resource specialists to devise the best strategies for translating an explosion of archaeological information for the public. In turn, some communities are partnering with archaeologists to become active players in the excavation, interpretation, and preservation of their heritage.

The last decade has witnessed numerous applications of public interpretation and outreach models and an increased interest in establishing partnerships between professional practitioners in public interpretation and educational institutions such as museums and schools. These developments have occurred in the context of a realization that community-based partnerships are the most effective mechanism for long-term success. It is clear that there is a need for a volume that addresses these latest trends and provides case studies of successful partnerships.

The World Heritage community is currently adopting policies to mainstream human rights as part of a wider sustainability agenda. This interdisciplinary book combines a state of the art review of World Heritage policy and practice at the global level with ethnographic case studies from the Asia-Pacific region by leading scholars in the field. By joining legal reviews, anthropology and practitioner experience through in-depth case studies, it shows the diversity of human rights issues in both natural and cultural heritage sites. From site-designation to their conservation and management, the book explores the various rights issues and analyses the diverse social, cultural and legal challenges and responses at both regional and global level. Detailed case studies are included from Australia, Cambodia, China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines and Vietnam. The book will appeal to both natural and cultural heritage professionals and human rights and heritage scholars, and will serve as a useful compendium for courses use allowing students to compare, contrast and contextualize different contexts.

Why is fashion "in fashion" in museums today? This timely volume brings together expert scholars and curators to examine the reasons behind fashion's popularity in the twenty-first century museum and the impact this has had on wider museum practice. Chapters explore the role of fashion in the museum across a range of international case studies including the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Fashion Museum at Bath, ModeMuseum in Antwerp and many more. Contributions look at topics such as how fashion has made museums accessible to diverse audiences and how curators present broader themes and issues such as gender, class and technology innovatively through exhibiting fashion. Drawing on approaches from dress history, fashion studies, museum studies and curatorship, this engaging book will be key reading for students and scholars across a range of disciplines.

The Museum Environment is in two parts; Part I: intended for conservators and museum curators and describes the principles and techniques of controlling the environment so that the potentially damaging effects of light, humidity and air pollution on museum exhibits may be minimised. Part II: the author brings together and summarises information and data, hitherto widely scattered in the literature of diverse fields, which is essential to workers in conservation research.
Since the timely publication of the first two editions of this book in hardback, interest in preventive conservation has continued to grow strongly making publication of this paperback edition all the more welcome. Those whose responsibility it is to care for the valuable and beautiful objects in the world's collections have become increasingly aware that it is better to prevent their deterioration, by ensuring that they are housed and displayed in the best possible environmental conditions, than to wait until restoration and repair are necessary. The changes for the second edition have been mainly concentrated in the sections on electronic hygrometry, new fluorescent lamps, buffered cases, air conditioning systems, data logging, and control within historic buildings. A new appendix, giving a summary of museum specificiations for conservation, provides a useful, quick reference.
* New paperback edition of successful text
* Now at lower price
* Essential reading for conservators and museum curators and scientists

The home and the museum are typically understood as divergent, even oppositional, social realms: whereas one evokes privacy and familial intimacy, the other is conceived of as a public institution oriented around various forms of civic identity. This meticulous, insightful book draws striking connections between both spheres, which play similar roles by housing objects and generating social narratives. Through fascinating explorations of the museums and domestic spaces of eight representative Israeli communities-Chabad, Moroccan, Iraqi, Ethiopian, Russian, Religious-Zionist, Christian Arab, and Muslim Arab-it gives a powerful account of museums' role in state formation, proposing a new approach to collecting and categorizing particularly well-suited to societies in conflict.

This book is a detailed critical study of Libeskind's Berlin Jewish Museum in its historical, architectural and philosophical context. Emphasizing how the Holocaust changed our perception of history, memory, witnessing and representation, it develops the notion of 'memorial ethics' to explore the Museum's difference from more conventional post-World War Two commemorative sites. The main focus is on the Museum as an experience of the materiality of trauma which engages the visitor in a performative duty to remember. Arleen Ionescu builds on Levinas's idea of 'ethics as optics' to show how Libeskind's Museum becomes a testimony to the unpresentable Other. Ionescu also extends the Museum's experiential dimension by proposing her own subjective walk through Libeskind's space reimagined as a 'literary museum'. Featuring reflections on texts by Beckett, Celan, Derrida, Kafka, Blanchot, Wiesel and Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (Celan's cousin), this virtual tour concludes with a brief account of Libeskind's analogous 'healing project' for Ground Zero.

This book is a groundbreaking attempt to rethink the landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorising 'social haunting': the ways in which the social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again. Examining the relationship between historical practices such as archaeology and archival work in order to think about how the social landscape is reinvented with reference to the ghosts of the past, the author explores the literary and historical status and accounts of the ghost, not for what they might tell us about these figures, but for their significance for our, constantly re-invented, re-vivified, re-ghosted social world. With chapters on haunted houses and castles, slave ghosts, the haunting airs of music, the prehistoric origin of spirits, Marxist spectres, Freudian revenants, and the ghosts in the machine, Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory adopts multi-disciplinary methods for understanding the past, the dead and social ghosts and the landscapes they appear in. A sociology of haunting that illustrates how social landscapes have their genesis and perpetuation in haunting and the past, this volume will appeal to sociologists and social theorists with interests in memory, haunting and culture.

Exploring the role of museums, galleries and curators during the upheaval of the Second World War, this book challenges the accepted view of a hiatus in museum services during the conflict and its immediate aftermath. Instead it argues that new thinking in the 1930s was realised in a number of promising initiatives during the war only to fail during the fragmented post-war recovery. Based on new research including interviews with retired museum staff, letters, diaries, museum archives and government records, this study reveals a complex picture of both innovation and inertia. At the outbreak of war precious objects were stored away and staff numbers reduced, but although many museums were closed, others successfully campaigned to remain open. By providing innovative modern exhibitions and education initiatives they became popular and valued venues for the public. After the war, however, museums returned to their more traditional, collections-centred approach and failed to negotiate the public funding needed for reconstruction based on this narrower view of their role. Hence, in the longer term, the destruction and economic and social consequences of the conflict served to delay aspirations for reconstruction until the 1960s. Through this lens, the history of the museum in the mid-twentieth century appears as one shaped by the effects of war but equally determined by the input of curators, audiences and the state. The museum thus emerges not as an isolated institution concerned only with presenting the past but as a product of the changing conflicts and cultures within society.

This book examines the relationship between art and tourism through the study of the material culture of tourism: tourist art and souvenirs. It thoroughly examines how to categorise the material culture of tourism within the discourses of contemporary art and cultural anthropology, and demonstrates that tourist art is a unique expression of place and genuine artistic style. The first investigation to consider the activity of souvenirs from both indigenous and settler tourist sites, it brings a unique addition to the existing, dated, research in the area. Working initially from Graburn's definition of tourist art, as the art of one culture made specifically for the consumption of another, Tourism Art and Souvenirs sheds light on important aspects of the souvenir that have not been widely discussed. The most recent research is used to consider how the souvenir is designed and consumed, consumer expectations and influence on the character of the souvenir, how the souvenir maker is consumed by the tradition of heritage and how products become successful as souvenirs. The title also investigates the language involved in the representation of place and the recording of experience through the souvenir, developing a method that expresses the descriptive data of individual souvenir artefacts graphically so the patterns of language may be analysed. Enhancing the understanding of material culture in tourism and therefore adding to future tourism development this volume will be of interest to upper level students, researchers and academics in tourism, culture, heritage and sustainability.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum reveals and traces the transformation of ancient Jewish symbols, rituals, archetypes and narratives deployed in these sites. Demonstrating how cloaking the 'secular' history of the Holocaust in sacred garb, memorial museums generate redemptive yet conflicting visions of the meaning and utility of Holocaust memory.

Contemporary Cases in Heritage Tourism: Volume 1 examines 9 international cases under the sections of Managing Heritage Sites, World Heritage Sites, and Heritage Tourism. Cases include: Festivals as Expressions of Heritage: A Viking Case Study, Ethnic Enclaves as Visitor Attractions: Singapore's Little India, Managing Religious Heritage Attractions: The Case of Jerusalem Challenges faced by heritage projects in a rapidly changing society: The case of Wutai Shan, China, Edinburgh WHS: A Heritage Case Study, Indigenous Tourism and Heritage: A Maori Case Study and more. Written by established experts in the field, the volume comprises substantial, in-depth and detailed case studies, written with specific learning objectives in mind. Furthermore, each case is fully referenced in academic style and accompanied by a wealth of supplementary material including discussion questions, further reading and links to websites. Teaching notes, slides, essay questions, exam questions with guide answers, links to further resources are also available from the website (www.goodfellowpublishers.com). All cases within Contemporary Cases in Heritage Tourism: Volume 1 are available for individual download from the Contemporary Cases Online website (see www.goodfellowpublishers.com) or for e-readers (Kindle, Kobo), and can be purchased in a 'pick-and-mix' fashion to suit the needs of the reader. The online cases are packed with hyperlinks to original sources, further readings and websites. Readers can follow these links to obtain further information about the specific concepts, terms, issues and organisations identified in each case. Features of this book and those in the series include: * Topical currency: a series of up-to-date, topical case studies in the allied fields of tourism, heritage, hospitality, leisure, retail, events and sport; * Rich, in-depth treatment of material: extensive case studies with copious illustrative material to draw students in to the cases; * Additional student material: discussion questions, further reading, links to websites; * Tutor resources: teaching notes, slides, essay questions, exam questions with guide answers, links to further resources; * Online purchase: individual cases chapters will be available for purchase individually or in volume packages.

Via the Smithsonian Institution, an exploration of the growing friction between the research and outreach functions of museums in the 21st century. Describing participant observation and historical research at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History as it prepared for its largest-ever exhibit renovation, Deep Time, the author provides a grounded perspective on the inner-workings of the world's largest natural history museum and the social processes of communicating science to the public. From the introduction: In exhibit projects, the tension plays out between curatorial staff-academic, research, or scientific staff charged with content-and exhibitions, public engagement, or educational staff-which I broadly group together as "audience advocates" charged with translating content for a broader public. I have heard Kirk Johnson, Sant Director of the NMNH, say many times that if you look at dinosaur halls at different museums across the country, you can see whether the curators or the exhibits staff has "won." At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it was the curators. The hall is stark white and organized by phylogeny-or the evolutionary relationships of species-with simple, albeit long, text panels. At the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Johnson will tell you, it was the "exhibits people." The hall is story driven and chronologically organized, full of big graphic prints, bold fonts, immersive and interactive spaces, and touchscreens. At the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where Johnson had previously been vice president and chief curator, "we actually fought to a draw." That, he says, is the best outcome; a win on either side skews the final product too extremely in one direction or the other. This creative tension, when based on mutual respect, is often what makes good exhibitions.