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 Kylie Message
September 18, 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 05, 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 23, 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 ...
By Natalia Grincheva
July 05, 2019
Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy traces the transformation of museums from publicly or privately funded heritage institutions into active players in the economic sector of culture. Exploring how this transformation reconfigured cultural diplomacy, the book argues that museums have become ...
By Helena Robinson
March 26, 2019
Interpreting Objects in the Hybrid Museum examines the recent trend for converged collecting institutions and uses its investigation as a catalyst for critical reflection by all stakeholders on the risks, as well as advantages, of integration for cultural engagement.Drawing on three case studies of...
By Michelle Horwood
November 22, 2018
Sharing Authority in the Museum provides a detailed and fully contextualised study of a heritage assemblage over time, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Focussing on Māori objects, predominantly originating from the Ngā Paerangi tribe, housed in Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the ...
By Kylie Message
September 29, 2017
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 ...