Kylie  Message Author of Evaluating Organization Development
FEATURED AUTHOR

Kylie Message

Senior Fellow, Humanities Research Centre
The Australian National University

Professor Kylie Message is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research investigates the role that museums play as sites of cultural and political exchange. Her new book series, 'Museums in Focus', challenges authors and readers to radically rethink the relationships between cultural and intellectual dissent and crisis and debates about museums, politics and the broader public sphere.

Biography

Professor Kylie Message is Senior Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. Prior to this she was Interim Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts , and before that, Head of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. Kylie is the author of books including Museums and Racism (Routledge 2018), The Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge (Routledge 2018), Museums and Social Activism: Engaged Protest (Routledge 2013), New Museums and the Making of Culture (Berg, 2006), and Museum Theory: An Expanded Field (edited, with Andrea Witcomb, Blackwell 2015). She is founding co-editor (with Sandra Dudley) of Museum Worlds: Advances in Research (Berghahn). For publication list and full profile, see https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/message-kr

Professor Message established the Routledge Museums in Focus series in 2017. Featuring short-format books, the series 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. Forthcoming titles for the series include Curatorial Activism.

Advance praise for the series has included: 'This is a strikingly original proposal for a fresh new series of short works in museum studies.' (Associate Professor Conal McCarthy, Victoria University of Wellington); and 'Despite the hunger to tackle this emerging topic, there are still few ways to explore museum dissent and disobedience using a critical framework. The occupation of museums by advocacy groups, invisible museum agendas and issues of institutional racism are emotive and compelling subjects. While these subjects are highly visible in the museum space they are still difficult to discuss and problematise in the classroom as the literature has yet to catch up with several new and rapidly evolving phenomena. I can see this series filling a gap and with this notion of the rapid response I would hope that it would provide a platform for discussing current issues that students are drawn to but which have yet to be framed by the academy.' (Dr Emma Martin, University of Manchester/National Museums Liverpool)

For more information about the series, or to discuss making a possible submission, contact [email protected]

Education

    PhD, University of Melbourne, 2003

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

    Museum and Heritage Studies
    Cultural Studies
    Political History
    Public History
    Political and Social Activism
    Citizenship and Identity
    Race and Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality, and Class Studies
    Globalisation and national identity
    Material culture studies
    Museum Anthropology
    Cultural theory

Websites

Books

Featured Title
 Featured Title - Curatorial Activism - 1st Edition book cover

Photos

News

"Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street" OUT NOW!

By: Kylie Message
Subjects: Anthropology - Soc Sci, Art & Visual Culture, Critical & Creative Life Writing, History, Media and Cultural Studies, Media, Journalism and Communications, Museum and Heritage Studies , Other, Urban Studies

"Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street" argues that that the material collections produced by participants of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 bear witness to the experience and agency of ‘the 99%’. Modelling strategies for ‘activating’ historical archives and collections-based data, and for engaging with autoethnographic records to represent and analyze the material residue of protest and reform movements today, the book is a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners engaged with contemporary cause-based collecting, activist archiving, public history, and the cultural politics and sociology of social reform movements. #thedisobedientmuseum #rebelmuse_routledge #museumstudies #challengingthinking #culturalactivism #culturehack #socialchange #bethechange @RoutledgeHist @routledgebooks @tandf_australia

 

Q & A with Kylie Message

By: Kylie Message
Subjects: Anthropology - Soc Sci, Area Studies, Art & Visual Culture, Communication Studies, Critical & Creative Life Writing, Education, History, Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, Media, Journalism and Communications, Museum and Heritage Studies , Other, Research Methods, Urban Studies

‘We spoke with Kylie Message, author of the newly published title "Museums and Racism”, to understand more about how museums grapple with social issues such as racism. We are pleased to present our Q&A session with Kylie Message about her recent book Museums and Racism. Kylie is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research investigates the role that museums play as sites of cultural and political exchange. Her new book series, 'Museums In Focus', challenges authors and readers to radically rethink the relationships between cultural and intellectual dissent and crisis and debates about museums, politics and the broader public sphere.'

"Museums and Racism" OUT NOW!

By: Kylie Message
Subjects: Anthropology - Soc Sci, Area Studies, Art & Visual Culture, Communication Studies, History, Media and Cultural Studies, Media, Journalism and Communications, Museum and Heritage Studies , Other, Research Methods, Urban Studies

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. “Museums and Racism” is key reading for students and scholars of museum studies, public history and cultural studies around the world. #thedisobedientmuseum #rebelmuse_routledge #museumstudies #challengingthinking #culturalactivism #culturehack #socialchange #bethechange @RoutledgeHist @routledgebooks @tandf_australia

#thedisobedientmuseum OUT NOW!

By: Kylie Message
Subjects: Anthropology - Soc Sci, Art & Visual Culture, History, Media and Cultural Studies, Media, Journalism and Communications, Museum and Heritage Studies , Other, Research Methods, Urban Studies

“The Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge” reimagines writing about museums as an activity where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting can be produced, and theorizes this process as a form of protest against disciplinary stagnation. The first volume in Routledge’s innovative ‘Museums in Focus’ series, “The Disobedient Museum” will be of interest to scholars and students in interdisciplinary fields including Museum and Heritage Studies, Public History, and Cultural Studies. #thedisobedientmuseum #rebelmuse_routledge #museumstudies #challengingthinking #culturalactivism #culturehack #socialchange #bethechange @RoutledgeHist @routledgebooks @tandf_australia

Museums In Focus CFP now available

By: Kylie Message

ABOUT THE SERIES

Routledge Museums In Focus is a short-format book series that challenges authors and readers to experiment with, innovate, and provoke 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. Titles forthcoming in 2017 include The Disobedient Museum, Curatorial Activism, and Museums and Racism.

Committed to the articulation of big, even risky, ideas in small format publications, 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 to 30,000-50,000 words in length and fully refereed. In addition to providing timely, intellectually agile cutting edge responses to topical socio-cultural and political challenges, the small books will exist themselves as collectible objects as well as in online form. Of interest to those seeking to write something longer than a journal article but shorter than a monograph, the books will attest to the contribution that museums and collections-based research make to the intellectual history of the late twentieth century at the same time as they will encourage and engage with new conceptual or methodological approaches toward complex problems embodied, reflected, or caused by museums.

ADVANCE PRAISE

This is a strikingly original proposal for a fresh new series of short works in museum studies. … Associate Professor Conal McCarthy, Victoria University of Wellington.

Despite the hunger to tackle this emerging topic, there are still few ways to explore museum dissent and disobedience using a critical framework. The occupation of museums by advocacy groups, invisible museum agendas and issues of institutional racism are emotive and compelling subjects. While these subjects are highly visible in the museum space they are still difficult to discuss and problematise in the classroom as the literature has yet to catch up with several new and rapidly evolving phenomena. I can see this series filling a gap and with this notion of the rapid response I would hope that it would provide a platform for discussing current issues that students are drawn to but which have yet to be framed by the academy. … Dr Emma Martin, University of Manchester/National Museums Liverpool.

SUBMIT A PROPOSAL

We invite proposals – by writers, scholars, museum professionals, cultural activists and others – for book ideas that:

  • Extend current debates over a particular type of museum, collection, cultural activity, event, product or phenomenon, ethical conundrum, subcultural critique or hacker process, curatorial activism, protest or campaign culture, cultural conflict, or political context, theory or history.
  • Address an urgent disciplinary, methodological, or social problem or conflict involving museums, heritage (place, object-based and intangible, including music), collections, or related subject.
  • Model ways of extending or challenging the museological canon to become ever more agile, responsive, and accountable to the frequently stated claims of social justice and community engagement.
  • Provide innovative approaches toward modelling intellectual critique; these could potentially include graphic novels, co-written and multi-person dialogue pieces, or other alternative formats.

We particularly welcome proposals that investigate how the discourses and experiences of crisis and dissent in cultural, political, and everyday life influence or affect the way we understand museums, heritage, and other forms of cultural phenomena and activism; and invite manuscripts that ask how these themes and others – including identity and collective rights and actions over issues including race, class, disability, gender, and sexuality; challenges to citizenship laws and norms and normative approaches to understanding power, ideology and nationalism – engage with anthropology museums, human rights museums, labour history or union museums, presidential library museums, political history collections, activist art events or interventions, protest art movement and activist interventions (historical or contemporary), ecomuseums, local and community based museums, science-based collections, formations of radical history and archiving, etc., etc.

As short books that aim to present ways of grappling with big challenges or modelling disciplinary or methodological disruption, the writing and commitment to a crisp and clear line of arguing is of the uppermost importance.

For further information about the series, submission guidelines, or to discuss a potential proposal, please contact the series editor at [email protected]