Committed to the articulation of big, even risky, ideas in short-format publications, Museums In Focus challenges authors and readers to experiment with, innovate, and press museums and the intellectual frameworks through which we view these. It offers a platform for approaches that radically rethink the relationships between cultural and intellectual dissent and crisis and debates about museums, politics and the broader public sphere.
Museums In Focus is motivated by the intellectual hypothesis that museums are not innately ‘useful’, safe’ or even ‘public’ places, and that recalibrating our thinking about them might benefit from adopting a more radical and oppositional form of logic and approach. Examining this problem requires a level of comfort with (or at least tolerance of) the idea of crisis, dissent, protest and radical thinking, and authors might benefit from considering how cultural and intellectual crisis, regeneration and anxiety have been dealt with in other disciplines and contexts.
Books published in the series are between 30,000 and 50,000 words in length and fully refereed. If you would like to discuss submitting a proposal, please contact the series editor: [email protected]
Further information about Professor Message's work can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/authors/i14753-kylie-message.
By Caroline Wilson-Barnao
January 09, 2023
Digital Access and Museums as Platforms draws on interviews with museum practitioners, along with a range of case studies from public and private institutions, in order to investigate the tensions and benefits involved in making cultural collections available using digital technologies. Taking a ...
By Ana Lucia Araujo
January 09, 2023
Museums and Atlantic Slavery explores how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented through words, visual images, artifacts, and audiovisual materials in museums in Europe and the Americas. Divided into four chapters, the book addresses four recurrent themes: wealth ...
By Njabulo Chipangura, Jesmael Mataga
January 09, 2023
Museums as Agents for Social Change is the first comprehensive text to examine museum practice in a decolonised moment, moving beyond known roles of object collection and presentation. Drawing on studies of Mutare museum, a regional museum in Eastern Zimbabwe, this book considers how museums with ...
By Robert Hudson, Shannon Woodcock
April 04, 2022
Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation explores Indigenous practices of curation, object repatriation, and cross-cultural community engagement in a dynamic Koori museum. Grounded in the fact that Gunai Kurnai people have never ceded sovereignty, the text reorients dominant...
By J. Pedro Lorente
February 21, 2022
Reflections on Critical Museology: Inside and Outside Museums offers a reflective and reflexive re-assessment of museum studies and the first wide-ranging account of critical museology. Drawing on an extensive range of examples from museums and across the museological literature, which are ...
By Kylie Message
March 31, 2021
Racism is a hot topic in museums today, as well as an urgent social issue. Focused on the broad field of multicultural policy, Museums and Racism examines how the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia, has responded to political culture and public debate around racism. Analysis focuses on the ...
By Nikki Sullivan, Craig Middleton
November 12, 2019
Queering the Museum develops a queer analysis of the ways in which museums construct themselves, their core business, and their publics through the, often unconscious, use of inherited ways of knowing and doing. Providing a critique of both the practices and conventions associated with the modern ...
By Adrian Franklin
November 05, 2019
Anti-Museum charts the development of the anti-museum as a concept and as it has been realised in practice. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the New Museum and PS1 in New York, Mona in Australia, Art42 in Paris and Donald Judd’s Marfa, the book assesses their potential to engage museum...
By Howard Morphy
October 29, 2019
Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols enters a dialogue about museums’ responsibility for the curation of their collections into an infinite future while also tackling contentious issues of repatriation and digital access to collections. Bringing into focus a number of key debates ...
By Kylie Message
September 17, 2019
Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street explores the material collections produced by participants of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 that bear witness to the experience and agency of ‘the 99%’. Examining processes of collection development as a lens through which to investigate the ...
Edited
By Hooley McLaughlin, Judy Diamond
September 03, 2019
Science Museums in Transition: Unheard Voices considers how museums can adapt their exhibits, programs, and organizational structures to the diversity of ideas, people, and cultures that speak to modern science. This collection contains individual expressions by museum insiders addressing a range ...
By Susan L.T. Ashley
August 20, 2019
Not satisfied with the assertion that museums have taken great strides in becoming representative, relevant and open in their preoccupations, A Museum in Public contends that the supposedly public nature of their institutional role continues to be a rhetorical one. This book critically examines ...
