Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

This article analyses the structure and results of a report published in April 2022 by the Danish Ministry of Culture on the feasibility of “shedding light on the possibilities of strengthening museum communication of Denmark's colonial history.” This article seeks to expose the underlying assumptions accompanying the term “colonial history” in the report. It suggests that “decolonization” and “decoloniality” would be more appropriate frameworks for museum development, as evidenced by current scholarship as well as curatorial trends elsewhere in Europe. Ultimately, it imagines how differently a report focusing on how Danish museums might embrace the process of decoloniality would look.

This is not a special issue, yet nearly every paper in this issue touches on the prickly topic of paying attention to different thoughts, perspectives, and voices to change practice. Authors from around the world have delved into themes of community engagement, authority, inclusion, and adaptability as critical pedagogical challenges. Their work is calling on all museum practitioners to live up to new expectations in an evolving landscape of cultural institutions and civil rights. Each study offers a counterpoint to the one preceding it. Comparing these papers will offer readers an opportunity to reflect on the state and future directions of their museum practice.

Several articles underscore the importance of community-informed approaches to museum design and programming. By blending community engagement with traditional museum practices, the institutions featured in these studies focus attention on whose experiences should be heard, and how authority is conferred. In some cases, focusing on visitors or users, while other papers focus on specific groups, including one paper that focuses on museum laborers as a constituency that is seldom considered an audience. These papers highlight the significance of recognizing and valuing the contributions of all stakeholders, and what it will take to foster a sense of ownership and belonging within museum spaces.

A second theme that we discovered looking across the many papers we have received in the past year was how authority and representation exist in tension with existing collections. The interrogation of authority and representation in curatorial landscapes includes how museums themselves make a place or contend with colonial legacies so entrenched within collections and communication practices that they are now driving critical disruptions to what is considered power. They reveal the difficult work of decolonization and the necessity for root cause analysis as well as public performance. By amplifying historically marginalized voices and engaging in the work of building inclusivity into all practices, museums can foster more equitable and authentic representations of diverse communities. In doing so, museums are able to rethink universal access, not as a monolithic process, but as an intersectional enterprise that can honor diversity and equity while improving access and inclusion. These researchers continue to push the edges of how museums can turn away from a representation of elite control to become welcoming environments that center community voices and promote equity that can redefine what cultural resources are or should be.

Last, in the after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, a few scholars have used data collected during that crisis to re-examine curation and how digital platforms can have a durable role in museum engagement. These papers highlight the importance of adaptability and innovation as a perpetual cycle of reinvention for museums.

This collection of artic

Amateur naturalists and natural history societies are abundant throughout the UK, and indeed throughout the globe, and have intimate relationships with the museum sector. Importantly, amateur naturalists and natural history societies often possess expertise in fields underserved by museums, such as taxonomy or the local history of natural history. The amateur naturalist, in the context of the museum, is simultaneously volunteer and expert and this dichotomy can lead to tension in the naturalist-museum professional relationship. The rise of mass-participation citizen science and digitization projects are likely to further enflame this tension as naturalists can feel marginalized as their identifier of “volunteer” subsumes that of “expert.” This paper recommends best practice when working with amateur naturalists and natural history societies. It examines the different value systems and priorities broadly held by museum professionals and naturalists, with a particular focus on digitization. This paper also suggests how the museum field can work toward more equitable knowledge building and sharing practices when working with naturalists and other expert-volunteers. In particular, it puts forward the concept of messy databases as a way to meaningfully engage with volunteer-experts.

Political scientists and historians often credit the intangible heritage of language for the development or manufacturing of national identities. By controlling language through printing and media, it is possible to impose a common identity representing a political, diplomatic, and economic unity. This paper aims to illuminate the often-unstated influences of urban and architectural language on the impact of cultural production, and to show how modernist syntax and vocabulary were hijacked into a colonial system through the control of the urban fabric, as an attempt to displace primary identity markers such as empire and religion. However, the socialist ideals of the Modern Movement that developed in the USSR after World War I, were a critical tangible component in this melting pot. At time of its ratification of the World Heritage Convention, the USSR did not nominate any properties in Central Asia, perhaps as a reaction against local identities. An exception was Itchan Kala which was nominated for inclusion as an “open-air city museum.” ICOMOS in its evaluation of the long-term risks involved in transferring all the settlement and artisanal areas beyond its borders, warned that Itchan Kala would become a dead city with the local population cast into the role of “benign traditionalists” (ICOMOS, Evaluation of the Nomination – Historic Centre of Itchan-kala, Khiva. Paris: ICOMOS, 1990, 39). Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the entire Russian bloc faced issues arising from changing values and renewed identities, the speed of change and active vestiges of the past. The post-USSR reaction in Central Asia was through a regenerated Timurid narrative in the inscription of World Heritage properties in Uzbekistan, particularly in Shakhrisyabz, Bukhara, and Samarkand. The shift from an emphasis on architectural monuments toward a broader recognition of the social, cultural, and economic processes in the conservation of urban values comes together with the need for integrative sustainable development. This is matched by a drive to adapt existing leftover planning policies from the Soviet regime by creating new tools to address this postcolonial national vision.

Children's museums are a distinct type of museum—one particularly poised to engage and support the development of Lifelong Competencies that will help children live into their own successful and fulfilling futures. Understudied in the children's museum, which one(s) they prioritize is largely unknown, and, thus, so is their optimization. This work draws upon the important communication tool of institutional mission statements. Frequency analysis of the terms in 321 American children's museum mission statements (Study A) identified that children's museums prioritize the Lifelong Competencies of creativity and curiosity. Thematic analysis of the 119 mission statements that included these terms (Study B) indicated that children's museums' intended practice for achieving creativity and curiosity is through experiences, environments, and play with a focus on hands-on and interactive elements, family-friendly features, eliciting a positive affect, and experiences that are educational and innovative. Furthermore, creativity and curiosity are primarily valued as mediators toward learning.

One of MoHoA's main aims has been to advocate for positive and meaningful change in the reconceptualization of what might constitute modern heritage through policy and practice. Central to this endeavor is The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage. Conceived in the spirit of the Nara Document on Authenticity (1994), which successfully achieved a similar paradigmatic shift in the global conceptualization and assessment of authenticity, The Cape Town Document seeks to achieve a similar global consensus on the reconceptualization of modern heritage. Relieved of its Eurocentric, homogenous, universalizing, developmental, and colonial associations and references that framed its definition in the 20th century, MoHoA supports its recasting as a plural and planetary phenomenon that heralded the Anthropocene. The purpose was to encourage a fuller and more complete account of global encounters with modernity through the recognition and ascription of value to cultural experiences and expressions of the modern that have until now been overlooked, marginalized, or excluded from the existing canon of modern heritage. A draft of The Cape Town Document was produced after the first MoHoA conference in 2021 and published in the MoHoA special edition of Curator: The Museum Journal in August 2022. The following draft was developed following the second MoHoA conference in October 2022 and presented to UNESCO and its advisory bodies in 2023.

In this paper, we share and reflect on the co-development of an assessment tool for educators; an observation tool to identify evidence of learning and engagement in a museum and library makerspaces. Through a collaborative and iterative design process with educators, we co-developed, revised, and refined an observation tool to be used by maker educators, researchers, and evaluators. Through this process, we evolved roles that leveraged the strengths and perspectives of both the researchers and educators involved. We also discuss implications for co-design as an approach for professional learning of informal educators.

This article develops on the plenary paper we presented for the second Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene Symposium (MoHoA), held at the Bartlett School of Architecture(UCL) October 26–28, 2022. At the first MOHoA Symposium in Cape Town in 2021 titled Learning from Steinkopf, we invoked Learning from Las Vegas (by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izneour, published in 1972) to consider South African architect Roelof Uytenbogaardt's award-winning 1975 Steinkopf Community Centre building in the desert in South Africa. In the process of this research we pay attention to Scott Brown's multiple contributions beyond architecture and urban design. In this article we explore the extraordinary complexity and complicity of the life and work of Denise Scott Brown through her photography. She was born, brought up and educated in Africa, after which the major part of her career was in the United States, where she is known and celebrated as a great American architect. Our article follows her life and career through a consideration not of her architectural interventions nor buildings, but of her photographs, which have become the subject of more recent attention. As a woman who photographed at a time when the global field was almost completely dominated by men, her practice as a photographer spans many decades across the African and North American continents. Documenting her projects and sites, her photographs were intended as teaching materials for use in her lectures on architecture, planning, landscape and art history. We suggest that, viewed differently, her photographs speak to questions of societal modernity and inequalities that are also informed by her southern African experiences. In the 1990s Scott Brown claimed, “I have an African's view of Las Vegas.” From our location as an architect and a photographer working in Africa now, in this research we learn from Scott Brown's Las Vegas, her images of the city and desert and her photographic archive.