Museums and Social Activism is the first study to bring together historical accounts of the African American and later American Indian civil rights-related social and reform movements that took place on the Smithsonian Mall through the 1960s and 1970s in Washington DC with the significant but unknown story about museological transformation and curatorial activism that occurred in the Division of Political and Reform History at the National Museum of American History at this time.

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 conceptualization of the Immigration Museum in the mid-1990s, and on the most recent permanent exhibition to be opened there, in 2011, which coincided with the publication of a ne...

The Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge aims to motivate disciplinary thinking to reimagine writing about museums as an activity where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting can be produced, and to theorize this process as a form of protest against disciplinary stagnation.Drawing on a range of cultural, theoretical, and political approaches, Kylie Message examines potential links between methods of critique today and moments of historical and discipli...

In the last decade, museums all around the world have been reinventing themselves. They are now much more than scholarly, cultural archives. A remit to reach out to a broader public, the increasing politicization of the ownership and curation of objects, the architectural expectations of new buildings, the requirements of the "event exhibit"...all have changed the way any new museum is built, operates and serves its public purpose. Museums now reflect global economics and local politics. N...

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 sociology of protest and reform movements, the book questions what contribution a dual study of the material culture of dissent and the production of a collection hosting the material cultu...

MUSEUM THEORY EDITED BY ANDREA WITCOMB AND KYLIE MESSAGEMuseum 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 wor...

Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics is a theoretically informed reconceptualization of museum ethics discourse as a dynamic social practice central to the project of creating change in the museum. Through twenty-seven chapters by an international and interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners it explores contemporary museum ethics as an opportunity for growth, rather than a burden of compliance. The volume represents diverse strands in museum activity from exhibitions...

This book considers the state of the city and contemporary urbanisation from a range of intellectual and international perspectives.The most interdisciplinary collection of its kindProvides a contemporary update on urban thinking that builds on well established debates in the fieldUses the city to explore economic, social, cultural, environmental and political issues more broadlyIncludes contributions from non Western perspectives and cities...

Museums and the Public Sphere investigates the role of museums around the world as sites of democratic public space.Explores the role of museums around the world as sites of public discourse and democracyExamines the changing idea of the museum in relation to other public sites and spaces, including community cultural centers, public halls and the internetOffers a sophisticated portrait of the public, and how it is realized, invoked, and understoo...

"This extraordinary collage of sophisticated essays on key terms in urban geography both provides a conventional basis to and recasts innovatively a burgeoning field in the discipline."- Roger Keil, co-Editor, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research"The city is an obvious but confounding object of geographical analysis; urban structure and life are shaped by an astounding array of social, economic, and political dynamics. This volume em...

City provides an accessible yet critical introduction to one of the key ideas in human geography. While most of the world’s population now lives in cities, the definition and theoretical specification of the city nonetheless remains elusive. In this extensively updated second edition, Phil Hubbard considers the different ways that the lived and messy realities of urban life have been approached by geographers, past and present. Situating these in the context of ongoing debates concerning g...

Bringing the reader the very best of modern scholarship from the heritage community, this comprehensive reader outlines and explains the many diverse issues that have been identified and brought to the fore in the field of heritage, museums and galleries over the past couple of decades.The volume is divided into four parts:presents overviews and useful starting points for critical reflectionfocuses more specifically on selected issues of significance, lookin...