Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

This study focuses on the diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) practices of informal science institutions (ISI) that are part of a statewide grants program. Data were collected to understand how ISIs interpret and implement DEAI in thought and action in their efforts to create more welcoming spaces for members of communities that are often underrepresented or marginalized in informal learning spaces. Modeled after the Cultural Competence Learning Institute's (CCLI) Framework, survey data were collected to understand DEAI practices being used to create welcoming environments. Interview data were collected 2 years later to understand how ISIs collaborate with others to center communities in their work. Results indicated that while DEAI was considered a high priority, strategies were limited. A positive relationship was found between the number of strategies used and perceived success. ISIs' stories of collaboration focused most often on transactional relationships with organizational partners. Those working with communities directly collaborated in needs-based or reciprocal ways. Results are interpreted in relation to the CCLI Framework's potential to provide benchmarks for both individual institutions and groups like our statewide grants program to use as comparison points for their own DEAI practice.

Set in the tradition of museum ethnography, this article looks at museum participation through the lens of labor. Based primarily on interview material, it analyzes the lengthy—and laborious—participatory process behind the creation of “Berlin Global,” an exhibition at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Germany. The authors explore three aspects of participation related to labor, as identified in their research: the different types of knowledge and experience that participants bring with them, the organization of the participatory work process, and the presentation of the participants' contributions within the exhibition. The authors argue that because museum participation tends to be viewed as an act of civic duty, individually and socially meaningful, the different kinds of labor involved in it are often overlooked, resulting in power imbalances between curators and their external partners. A greater awareness of the labor demanded by participatory work is able to address this problem, decreasing the number of frictions and tensions, and thus making mutual beneficiality, participation's main goal, more achievable.

The use of digital museum objects has become an essential part of museums' communication and marketing strategies, research and teaching, and curatorial practices. This new visibility, amplified by the COVID-19 crisis, has not only revealed the possibilities of digital museum objects but has also underscored significant challenges, including the intricate relationship between digital museum objects and physical objects, the impact of digital museum objects on knowledge creation, and the online interaction with art and cultural heritage. Furthermore, it has drawn attention to the digital platforms that host digital museum objects, ranging from museum collection databases to online encyclopedias, cultural heritage platforms, and social media. The present paper explores these issues by examining how digital platforms are changing the way digital reproductions of artworks are used and reimagined, both inside and outside the institutions that house the artworks. To illuminate these dynamics, it looks at specific case studies, including the Getty Challenge, the online circulation of Delacroix's La liberté guidant le peuple, and the collection databases of Belgian museums and of the Mauritshuis. Theoretically, it combines the art historical concept of circulation with the notion of gray and colored memory drawn from digital memory studies. In doing so, it conceives of museum databases and cultural heritage platforms, as spaces of participation and neglect, of memory and oblivion, with a vast potential for producing new perspectives on art and cultural heritage and telling new (art) histories. In conclusion, the paper advocates for “circulation” as a key concept for revitalizing online collections of digital reproductions of artworks.

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.