Museum Theory
About this ebook
Museum Theory offers critical perspectives drawn from a broad range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. This volume describes and challenges previous ways of understanding museums and their relationship to society. Essays written by scholars from museology and other disciplines address theoretical reflexivity in the museum, exploring the contextual, theoretical, and pragmatic ways museums work, are understood, and are experienced.
Organized around three themes—Thinking about Museums, Disciplines and Politics, and Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory—the text includes discussion and analysis of different kinds of museums from various, primarily contemporary, national and local contexts. Essays consider subjects including the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere, cutting-edge museum practice and their connections with current global concerns, and the links between museum studies and disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, and history.
About the author
ANDREA WITCOMB is Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University and Deputy Director of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Victoria, Australia. She brings an interdisciplinary approach to her research, locating her work at the intersection of history, museology, and cultural studies.
KYLIE MESSAGE is Professor of Public Humanities in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Her research examines the relationships between cultural organizations, citizenship, government, and political reform movements.
