Coenraad Jacob Temminck and the Emergence of Systematics (1800-1850) is the first study to examine in detail the life and work of Coenraad Jacob Temminck (1778-1858), the Dutch naturalist who was the first director of 's Rijks Museum van Natuurlijke Historie (National Museum of Natural History) in Leiden, The Netherlands. This study situates Temminck's activities in the context of European natural history during the early to the mid-nineteenth century. Three issues which defined the era are discussed in more detail: the growing European colonial territories, the rise of scientific meritocracy, and the emergence of systematics as a discipline. Temminck's biography elucidates how and why systematics developed, and why its status within the natural sciences has been a matter of discussion for more than a century.

Museum collections are often perceived as static entities hidden away in storerooms or trapped behind glass cases. By focusing on the dynamic histories of museum collections, new research reveals their pivotal role in shaping a wide range of social relations. Over time and across space the interactions between these artefacts and the people and institutions who made, traded, collected, researched and exhibited them have generated complex networks of material and social agency.

In this innovative volume, the contributors draw on a broad range of source materials to explore the cross-cultural interactions which have created museum collections. These case studies contribute significantly to the development of new theoretical frameworks to examine broader questions of materiality, agency, and identity in the past and present.

Grounded in case studies from individual objects and museum collections from North America, Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, this truly international volume juxtaposes historical, geographical, and cross-cultural studies.

This work will be of great interest to archaeologists and anthropologists studying material culture, as well as researchers in museum studies and cultural heritage management."

This collection explores the broad landscape of current and future out-of-school science learning environments. Written by leading experts and innovators in informal science learning, these thoughtful and critical essays examine the changing nature of informal institutions such as science museums, zoos, nature centers, planetariums, aquaria, and botanical gardens and their impact on science education. The book examines the learning opportunities and challenges created by community-based experiences including citizen science, makerspaces, science media, escape rooms, hobby groups, and gaming. Based on current practices, case studies, and research, the book focuses on four cross-cutting themes-inclusivity, digital engagement, community partnerships, and bridging formal and informal learning-to examine the transformation in how people learn science informally. The book will be of interest to science and technology educators - both in and out of school - designers of science and experiential education programs, and those interested in building STEM learning ecosystems in their communities.

This important new work explores how evolutionary museums developed in the US, UK, and Australia in the late 19th century. This historical investigation also contributes to current debates, both on relationships between culture and the social, and to the rapidly changing practices of modern museums as they seek to shed the legacies of both evolutionary conceptions and colonial science, with the goal of contributing to the development and management of cultural diversity.

New York Times 'Best Art Books' 2020 'Essential' - Sunday Times 'Brilliantly enraged' - New York Review of Books 'A real game-changer'- Economist Walk into any Western museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The Brutish Museums sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. Since its first publication, museums across the western world have begun to return their Bronzes to Nigeria, heralding a new era in the way we understand the collections of empire we once took for granted.

Author Biography:
Richard Sandell is Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester and Research Associate of RCMG (Research Centre for Museums and Galleries)

Curating Art Now is a timely reflection on the practice of curating and the role of the art curator during a period of rapid change. Curating has a pivotal position in the art world: it is embedded in the identity and expertise of the museum and plays an ever-increasing role in the commercial art sector too. Current curatorial practice encompasses a wide range of activities, from the care of collections in museums to the presentation of large-scale contemporary biennials, and from collaboration with artists to presentations of work on digital platforms. Curating has grown substantially in the last decades, and in the early 2020s is undergoing a significant period of transition as it grapples with some fundamental questions. How diverse and inclusive is curating as a profession, and how does that inform the art and artists who come to prominence? How possible is it to conduct exploratory and inclusive curatorial work in the challenging economic climate of the early 2020s? What is the extent of a curator's autonomy within the various institutions and structures in which they work, and what power dynamics are at work between artists and curators? Finally, how might digital art and exhibition-making give way to hybrid forms of practice, and even challenge the face of traditional curating? Lilian Cameron's lively review addresses all of these issues, and considers the future landscape of curating in an uncertain world.

Beginning with the first comprehensive account of the discourse of appropriation that dominated the art world in the late 1970s and 1980s, Art After Appropriation suggests a matrix of inflections and refusals around the culture of taking or citation, each chapter loosely correlated with one year of the decade between 1989 and 1999. The opening chapters show how the Second World culture of the USSR gave rise to a new visibility for photography during the dissolution of the Soviet Union around 1989. Welchman examines how genres of ethnography, documentary and travel are crossed with fictive performance and social improvisation in the videos of Steve Fagin. He discusses how hybrid forms of subjectivity are delivered by a new critical narcissism, and how the Korean-American artist, Cody Choi converts diffident gestures of appropriation from the logic of material or stylistic annexation into continuous incorporated events. Art After Appropriation also examines the creation of public art from covert actions and social feedback, and how bodies participate in their own appropriation. Art After Appropriation concludes with the advent of the rainbow net, an imaginary icon that governs the spaces of interactivity, proliferation and media piracy at the end of the millennium.
John Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Modernism Relocated (1995) and Invisible Colors (1997); and editor of Rethinking Borders (1996), and a forthcoming three-volume anthology of the writings of LA artist MIke Kelley. Welchman has contributed to numerous journals, magazines, museum catalogues and newspapers, including Artforum; New York Times; Los Angeles Times; International Herald Tribune; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Haus der Kunst, Munich

Museums and the Working Class is the first book to take an intersectional and international approach to the issues of economic diversity and class within the field of museum studies. Bringing together 16 contributors from eight countries, this book has emerged from the significant global dialogue concerning museums' obligation to be inclusive, participate in meaningful engagement and advocate for social change. As part of the push for museums to be more accessible and inclusive, museums have been challenged to critically examine their power relationships and how these are played out in what they collect, whose stories they exhibit and who is made to feel welcome in their halls. This volume will further this professional and academic debate through the discussion of class. Contributions to the book will also reinforce the importance of the working class - not only in collection and exhibition policy, but also for the organisational psychology of institutions. Museums and the Working Class is essential reading for scholars and students of museum, gallery and heritage studies, cultural studies, sociology, labour studies and history. It will also serve as a source of honest and research-led inspiration to practitioners working in museums, galleries, libraries, archives and at heritage sites around the world.

'The Organic Chemistry of Museum Objects' makes available in a single volume, a survey of the chemical composition, properties and analysis of the whole range of organic materials incorporated into objects and artworks found in museum collections. The authors cover the fundamental chemistry of the bulk materials such as wood, paper, natural fibres and skin products, as well as that of the relatively minor components incorporated as paint, media, varnishes, adhesives and dyes. This expanded second edition, now in paperback, follows the structure of the first, though it has been extensively updated. In addition to chapters on basic organic chemistry, analytical methods, analytical findings and fundamental aspects of deterioration, the subject matter is grouped as far as possible by broad chemical class - oils and fats, waxes, bitumens, carbohydrates, proteins, natural resins, dyestuffs and synthetic polymers. This is an essential purchase for all practising and student conservators, restorers, museum scientists, curators and organic chemists.

Following a period of ideological and practical change in museums, this book outlines new attitudes in curating and display, education and learning, text and interpretation, access, inclusion, participation, space, and the sustainability of the encyclopaedic collection. Focused on the contemporary period, the author questions the extent to which the museum visitor has become reliant on interpretative text and examines the development of new museum spaces where visitor interaction and engagement is welcomed. Changes of attitude have transformed our museums into modern spaces that reflect current needs and modern expectations and yet our permanent collections remain relatively unchanged, sometimes an uncomfortable reminder of a time when values, ethics and attitudes were very different. The author will discuss these conflicts of ideology. Written by a researcher with expertise in museum practice, this shortform book offers a new approach that will be valuable reading for students and scholars of cultural management and policy, as well as providing insights for reflective museum practitioners.

The controversy surrounding the significant "Into the Heart of Africa" exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada is explored in this compelling and analytical text. The exhibit has become an international, controversial touchstone for issues surrounding the politics of visual representation, such as the challenges to curatorial and ethnographic authority in multicultural and postcolonial contexts. Asking why the museum's exhibit failed so many people, the author examines such issues as institutional politics, the broad political and intellectual climate surrounding museums, the legacies of colonialism and traditions of representation of Africa, and the politics of irony.
By drawing upon anthropological and cultural criticism, the book offers a unique account of the ways in which an ambiguous exhibit about colonialism became the site of an expansiveInto the Heart of Africa."

Full Contributors:
Richard D. Altick, Arjun Appadurai, Tony Bennett, Carol A. Breckenridge, James Clifford, Philip Dodd, Carol Duncan, David Goodman, Stuart Hall, Robert Hewison, Eric Hobsbawn, Kenneth Hudson, Sharon Macdonald, Colin Mercer, Kevin Robins, Chris Rojek, Robert W. Rydell, Raphael Samuel, Roger Silverstone, Anthony D. Smith, John Urry, Patrick Wright

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.

In this updated and revised second edition, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill incorporates recent and important articles that address the relationships of museums and galleries to their audiences. The Educational Role of the Museum covers broad themes relevant to providing for all museum visitors and also focuses specifically on educational groups. Contents include:
* new communication models for the museum
* problems in visitor orientation and circulation
* increased exhibit accessibility through multisensory interaction
* education: at the heart of museums.

A comprehensive bibliography and exhibition chronology of the world's greatest museum of the decorative arts and design. The Victoria and Albert Museum, or South Kensington Museum as it used to be known, was founded by the British Government in 1852, out of the proceeds from the Great Exhibition of 1851. Like the Exhibition, it aimed to improve the expertise of designers, and the taste of the public, by exposing them to examples of good design from all countries and periods.
2,500 publications have to date been produced by, for, or in association with the V&A. The National Art Library, which is part of the Museum, has prepared this detailed catalogue, supplemented by a secondary list of 500 other books closely related to the V&A. The 1,500 exhibitions and displays recorded include those held in the main Museum and at its branches, the Bethnal Green Museum (now the National Museum of Childhood) and the Theatre Museum, Covent Garden, and additionally those it has organized at external venues, in Great Britain and abroad. The exhibitions and publications are fully cross-referenced, and there are name, title and subject indexes to the whole work, as well as an explanatory introduction.

Creating African Fashion Histories examines the stark disjuncture between African self-fashioning and museum practices. Conventionally, African clothing, textiles, and body adornments were classified by museums as examples of trade goods, art, and ethnographic materials—never as "fashion." Counterposing the dynamism of African fashion with museums' historic holdings thus provides a unique way of confronting ways in which coloniality persists in knowledge and institutions today. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and curators to debate sources and approaches for constructing African fashion histories and to examine their potential for decolonizing museums, fashion studies, and global cultural history. The editors of this volume seek to answer questions such as: How can researchers use museum collections to reveal traces of past self-fashioning that are obscured by racialized forms of knowledge and institutional practice? How can archival, visual, oral, ethnographic, and online sources be deployed to capture the diversity of African sartorial pasts? How can scholars and curators decolonize the Eurocentric frames of thinking encapsulated in historic collections and current curricula? Can new collections of African fashion decolonize museum practice? From Moroccan fashion bloggers to upmarket Lagos designers, the voices in this ground-breaking collection reveal fascinating histories and geographies of circulation within and beyond the continent and its diasporic communities.

This volume suggests a model of collective memory that distinguishes between two conceptual logics of memory fragmentation: vertical fragmentation and horizontal fragmentation. It offers a series of case studies of conflict and post-conflict collective memory, shedding light on the ways various actors participate in the production, dissemination, and contestation of memory discourses. With attention to the characteristics of both vertical and horizontal memory fragmentation, the book addresses the plurality of diverging, and often conflicting, memory discourses that are produced within the public sphere of a given community. It analyzes the juxtaposition, tensions, and interactions between narratives produced beyond or below the central state, often transcending national boundaries. The book is structured according to the type of actors involved in a memory fragmentation process. It explores how states have been trying to produce and impose memory discourses on civil societies, sometimes even against the experiences of their own citizens, and how such efforts as well as backlash from actors below and beyond the state have led to horizontal and vertical memory fragmentation. Furthermore, it considers the attempts by states’ representatives to reassert control of national memory discourses and the subsequent resistances they face. As such, this volume will appeal to sociology and political science scholars interested in memory studies in post-conflict societies.

Suzanne Keene's pioneering book shows how museums and other cultural organizations fit into the new world of information and electronic communications and, most importantly, how they can take advantage of what it has to offer.

By using new technology museums can build knowledge bases around information about collections. A collection object can be the central link for information about past and present, places, people and concepts, technologies, ways of working and evidence of the natural world. 'Digital Collections' explains how this vision can be realized. Sound, video and animations can be digitized and developed as a central resource that can be drawn on for many varied access routes: via the World Wide Web; CD ROMs; through on-gallery screens, and other future products still in development.
These technological capabilities raise many compelling issues that need to be understood in order to successfully develop information collections. In this book Suzanne Keene reviews these issues clearly and comprehensively. Her accompanying Click-Through Guide provides the latest news and links to Internet information:
http: //www.users.dircon.co.uk/~s-keene/infoage/infoage.htm
Suzanne Keene is a senior manager of museum collections and information at the Science Museum, London. She led the UK LASSI project to select a collections information system for UK museums. This, with her experience in directing information technology and multimedia projects, means that she is accustomed to translating the highly technical concepts of information technology into high level issues for senior and strategic management.
* Explains the Information Age/Information Economy and thestrategic implications for museums
* Describes the effects of increasing use of IT in museums and its future developments

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

A nostalgic interest in the past is a well-recognized feature of fast-changing, contemporary societies. It finds its expression in a variety of history-making practices of which the establishment of local heritage museums is a major manifestation in many parts of the world today. Katriel develops a communication-centered perspective on the study of heritage museums and -- by extension -- other tourist sites, highlighting the role of discourse in these institutionalized, yet vernacular contexts of cultural production, social legitimation, and identity formation.
Descriptive and critical in orientation, this book combines a close analysis of museum discourse with an exploration of such larger issues as:
* the socio-cultural role of museums as arenas for the production of collective memory,
* the ideological and performative constraints that shape museum presentations,
* the interfacing of verbal and visual codes of communication in the context of material displays,
* the dialectical interplay of the local and the global in contemporary life, and
* the interpenetration of the personal and the communal in vernacular processes of narrative production.
Of interest to scholars in communication, linguistics, anthropology, history, museum studies, tourism, intercultural communication, middle eastern studies, or those with interests in narratives, material culture, and ethnography.

Thousands of diverse museums, including art galleries and heritage sites, exist around the world today and they draw millions of people, audiences who come to view the exhibitions and artefacts and equally importantly, to learn from them about the world and themselves. This makes museums active public educators who imagine, visualise, represent and story the past and the present with the specific aim of creating knowledge. Problematically, the visuals and narratives used to inform visitors are never neutral. Feminist cultural and adult education studies have shown that all too frequently they include epistemologies of mastery that reify the histories and deeds of 'great men.' Despite pressures from feminist scholars and professionals, normative public museums continue to be rife with patriarchal ideologies that hide behind referential illusions of authority and impartiality to mask the many problematic ways gender is represented and interpreted, the values imbued in those representations and interpretations and their complicity in the cancellation of women's stories in favour of conventional masculine historical accounts that shore up male superiority, entitlement, privilege, and dominance. Feminist Critique and the Museum: Educating for a Critical Consciousness problematises museums as it illustrates ways they can be become pedagogical spaces of possibility. This edited volume showcases the imaginative social critique that can be found in feminist exhibitions, and the role that women's museums around the world are attempting to play in terms of transforming our understandings of women, gender, and the potential of museums to create inclusive narratives.

A nostalgic interest in the past is a well-recognized feature of fast-changing, contemporary societies. It finds its expression in a variety of history-making practices of which the establishment of local heritage museums is a major manifestation in many parts of the world today. Katriel develops a communication-centered perspective on the study of heritage museums and -- by extension -- other tourist sites, highlighting the role of discourse in these institutionalized, yet vernacular contexts of cultural production, social legitimation, and identity formation.
Descriptive and critical in orientation, this book combines a close analysis of museum discourse with an exploration of such larger issues as:
* the socio-cultural role of museums as arenas for the production of collective memory,
* the ideological and performative constraints that shape museum presentations,
* the interfacing of verbal and visual codes of communication in the context of material displays,
* the dialectical interplay of the local and the global in contemporary life, and
* the interpenetration of the personal and the communal in vernacular processes of narrative production.
Of interest to scholars in communication, linguistics, anthropology, history, museum studies, tourism, intercultural communication, middle eastern studies, or those with interests in narratives, material culture, and ethnography.

Museums and collecting is now a major area of cultural studies. This selected group of key texts opens the investigation and appreciation of museum history. Edward Edwards, chief pioneer of municipal public libraries, chronicles the founders and early donors to the British Museum. Greenwood and Murray provide informative pictures of the early history of the museum movement. Sir William Flower, Director of the British Museum (Natural History), takes a pioneering philosophical approach to the sphere of natural history with relation to museums. Similarly, Acland and Ruskin discuss and explore the relationships of art and architecture to museums.