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Narratives of Vulnerability in Museums

Author: Meighen Katz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-19

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0429888430

Narratives of Vulnerability in Museums is a study of the challenges museums face when they present narratives of instability, uncertainty, and fear in their exhibitions. As a period of sustained societal and personal vulnerability, the Great Depression remains a watershed era in American history. It is an era when iconic visual culture of deprivation mixes in the popular imagination with groundbreaking government policy and has immense potential for museums, but this is accompanied by significant challenges. Analysing a range of case studies, the book explores both the successes and obstacles involved in translating historical narratives of vulnerability to the exhibition floor. Incorporating an innovative, trans-genre museological model, the book draws connections between exhibitions of history, art, and technology, as well as heritage sites, focused on a single era. Employing interpretations of housing, preserved and reconstructed, to discuss ideas of belonging and community, the book also examines the power of the iconic national story and the struggle for local relevance through discussions on strikes and industrial action. Finally, it examines the use of fine art in history exhibitions to access the emotional aspects of historical experience. The result is a volume that considers both how societies talk about less celebratory aspects of history, but also the expectations placed on museums as interpreters of the public narrative and agents of change. Narratives of Vulnerability in Museums makes a significant contribution to discourses of museum and heritage studies, of interwar history, of the social role of cultural institutions, and to vulnerability and resilience studies. As such, it should be essential reading for scholars and students working in these disciplines, as well as architecture, cultural studies, and human geography.

Storytelling in Museums

Author: Adina Langer

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-06-22

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1538156954

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With chapters written by a diverse set of practitioners from across the museum field and around the world, Storytelling in Museums explores the efficacy and ethics of storytelling in museums. The book shows how museums use personal, local, and specific stories to make visitors feel welcome while inspiring them to engage with new ideas and unfamiliar situations. At the same time, the book explores the responsibilities of museum practitioners toward the storytellers included in their narratives and how those responsibilities shift over time and manifest in different contexts. The book’s eighteen chapters represent a conversation among a diverse set of professionals for whom storytelling connotes their daily museum practice. As educators, collectors, curators, designers, marketers, researchers, planners, and collaborators, the authors of this book consider the “real work” of storytelling from every angle. From the inclusion of personal stories in educational programs to the meta-narratives on display in exhibitions, this book balances practical examples with ethical considerations, placing the praxis of storytelling within the larger context of the 21st century museum. The book moves beyond advocacy for storytelling as an essential part of the museum’s toolkit to explore the many ways in which museums use personal stories, and multiple storytelling techniques, to support the larger public narratives embedded in their missions. The contributors demonstrate how museums that emphasize storytelling from multiple angles can serve as a kind of counterpoint to our tendency to fixate on singular images of things we know little about. They encourage museums to both acknowledge that they cannot control the narrative and to embrace their power to contribute to it through the multivalent, multivocal stories they choose to share.

Museums and Social Change

Author: Adele Chynoweth

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-09

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1000057844

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Museums and Social Change explores the ways museums can work in collaboration with marginalised groups to work for social change and, in so doing, rethink the museum. Drawing on the first-hand experiences of museum practitioners and their partners around the world, the volume demonstrates the impact of a shared commitment to collaborative, reflective practice. Including analytical discussion from practitioners in their collegial work with women, the homeless, survivors of institutionalised child abuse and people with disabilities, the book draws attention to the significant contributions of small, specialist museums in bringing about social change. It is here, the book argues, that the new museum emerges: when museum practitioners see themselves as partners, working with others to lead social change, this is where museums can play a distinct and important role. Emerging in response to ongoing calls for museums to be more inclusive and participate in meaningful engagement, Museums and Social Change will be essential reading for academics and students working in museum and gallery studies, librarianship, archives, heritage studies and arts management. It will also be of great interest to those working in history and cultural studies, as well as museum practitioners and social activists around the world.

Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories

Author: Kerstin Barndt

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-02-19

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 3110787466

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In response to systemic racism and institutions’ implications in histories of colonialism, nationalism, and exclusion, museum curators have embraced new ways of storytelling to face entangled memories and histories. Critical museum practices have consciously sought to unsettle established forms of representation, break with linear narratives of progress, and experiment with new modes of multivocal, multimedia, and subjective storytelling. The volume features analyses of narratives and narration in museums and heritage institutions today, as well as visions for future museum practices on a local, regional, national, transnational, and global scale. It is divided into three sections: Narrative Theory and Temporality, Ruptures and Repair, and Difficult Memories and Histories. Essays from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences examine museum practices in history, memorial, anthropological, and art museums across six continents. They develop narratological categories, reflect on immersive and virtual narratives, challenge colonial violence and hegemonic forms of representation, query the performance of heritage, parse exhibition design, and unearth techniques to express narratives of social justice.

Exhibiting Atrocity

Author: Amy Sodaro

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2018-01-23

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0813592178

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Today, nearly any group or nation with violence in its past has constructed or is planning a memorial museum as a mechanism for confronting past trauma, often together with truth commissions, trials, and/or other symbolic or material reparations. Exhibiting Atrocity documents the emergence of the memorial museum as a new cultural form of commemoration, and analyzes its use in efforts to come to terms with past political violence and to promote democracy and human rights. Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the trend: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world.

Mediating Vulnerability

Author: Anneleen Masschelein

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-11-25

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1800081138

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Mediating Vulnerability examines vulnerability from a range of connected perspectives. It responds to the vulnerability of species, their extinction but also their transformation. This tension between extreme danger and creativity is played out in literary studies through the pressures the discipline brings to bear on its own categories, particularly those of genre. Extinction and preservation on the one hand, transformation, adaptation and (re)mediation on the other. These two poles inform our comparative and interdisciplinary project. The volume is situated within the particular intercultural and intermedial context of contemporary cultural representation. Vulnerability is explored as a site of potential destruction, human as well as animal, but also as a site of potential openness. This is the first book to bring vulnerability studies into dialogue with media and genre studies. It is organised in four sections: ‘Human/Animal’; Violence/Resistance’; ‘Image/Narrative’; and ‘Medium/Genre’. Each chapter considers the intersection of vulnerability and genre from a comparative perspective, bringing together a team of international contributors and editors. The book is in dialogue with the reflections of Judith Butler and others on vulnerability, and it questions categories of genre through an interdisciplinary engagement with different representational forms, including digital culture, graphic novels, video games, photography and TV series, in addition to novels and short stories. It offers new readings of high-profile contemporary authors of fiction including Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, as well as bringing lesser-known figures to the fore.

Museum, Place, Architecture and Narrative

Author: Annika Bünz

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1800733895

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A characteristic trait of the maritime museums is that they are often located in a contemporary and/or historical environment from which the collections and narratives originate. The museum can thereby be directly linked to the site and its history. It is therefore vital to investigate the maritime museums in terms of relationships between landscape, architecture, museum and collections. This volume unravels the kinds of worlds and realities the Nordic maritime museums stage, which identities and national myths they depict, and how they make use of both the surrounding maritime environments and the architectural properties of the museum buildings.

Imperative Narratives

Author: Michael Tveten

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-06-18

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1475850832

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Imperative Narratives is a guidebook for all educators on how to become a more effective teacher, staff member, or administrator. It covers every aspect of storytelling, including how to choose the stories you tell, various methods and modalities for delivering those stories, and the tricks to becoming a master storyteller.

Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature

Author: Miriam Fernández-Santiago

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1000827984

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Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary representations of vulnerability may problematize its visibilization from an ethical and aesthetic perspective. Recent technological and scientific developments have accentuated human vulnerability in many and different ways at a cross-national, and even cross-species level. Disability, technological, and ecological vulnerabilities are new foci of interest that add up to gender, precarity and trauma, among others, as forms of vulnerability in this volume. The literary visualization of these vulnerabilities might help raise social awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities as well as those of others so as to bring about global solidarity based on affinity and affect. However, the literary representation of forms of vulnerability might also deepen stigmatization phenomena and trivialize the spectacularization of vulnerability by blunting readers’ affective response towards those products that strive to hold their attention and interest in an information-saturated, global entertainment market.