IntroductionMuseum design research has matured significantly in recent years and continues to unfold in increasingly experimental, collaborative and practical directions. Prior to 2000, there was very little consistent, focused and analytical museum design research and the relationships and collaborations that now define the field were almost non-existent.1 Since then, and linked to the transformation and increasing complexity of museum design itself, research in museum design (including museum architecture, exhibition design and/or what is now commonly referred to as experience or interpretive design) has been shaped and progressed by a growing number of museum design researchers, representative of the diversity of museum design itself. 2 The result is a small but dynamic research community comprising a whole range of people from museums, the creative industries, and academia and who span fields as diverse as architecture, various design disciplines, visitor studies, learning, theatre, animation, film and museum studies.The cross-sector and multi-disciplinary nature of the network means that it is populated by professionals of all career ages with exceptional thinking and research skills, highly sophisticated design skills as well as museum-based skills, knowledge and, importantly, agency. The network is unusual in academic terms because it has many of the characteristics that other research fields and academic teams hanker after but find hard to create: genuine 2 cross-sector links and a deep desire to join forces to create new ways of working, new knowledge and, again importantly, contributions to real and positive change in museums.Through an array of conferences, design classes, and events, in addition to publications, teaching collaborations and research projects, the network has begun to develop a shared language and a series of shared preoccupations, or research questions. 3Those interested in museum design can now draw upon a diverse literature including increasingly analytical studies of exhibition making and architectural forms, 4 historical analyses of exhibitions and the visions of visitor use embodied within them, 5 theoretically informed approaches to understanding museum experience 6 and, perhaps most significantly, preliminary understandings of the place of the physical stuff of museums and galleries in experience. 7 In addition to this diverse literature, students of museum design can draw on a whole body of research produced by design practitioners exploring and dissecting methodologies of museum design and explicating the thinking and design processes of specific interpretive projects. 8 These include: theatre-led, or scenographic approaches to museum design based on the notion that the physical material of the exhibition or display is, like the stage set in theatre, interpretive and active in the experiences and meaning making of visitors; 9 and the closely related narrative approaches to museum design based upon understandings of human subjects as, essentially, narrative, meaning-making bei...
Museum ethics as a domain of the museum field emerged in the mid‐twentieth century. However, this approach to ethics as professional practice, relying on fixed codes of ethics, has proved to be a constraining rather than an enabling process. Recently a new model of museum ethics has emerged; regarding ethics as a dynamic social practice, it encourages dialogue and critical thinking to develop socially purposeful museums. The Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester embarked upon a research project that took the form of a research network, bringing together museum leaders to test the potential of the new museum ethics to address key ethics issues with which museums are grappling. This research network expressed a compelling need for change in museums through the framework of the new museum ethics, a triad of three distinct but overlapping spheres: case studies; ethics codes; and values and principles. Participants agreed that this triad creates a powerful tool in its capacity to function as a set of lived values that connects ideas with actions and equips museums to develop responsive ethical policies and decision‐making now and the future. While many questions persist about the practical implications of the new museum ethics, responses from contributors reveal the significance to museum leaders of five ethics themes on which the network focused: social engagement; transparency; shared guardianship of collections; moving beyond canonicity; and sustainability.
Within the EU-Horizon-2020-funded project Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe (UNREST), 1 one work package (WP4) analyzed the memorial regimes of museums related to the history of World War I and World War II in Europe. An article by Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen (2016) entitled "Agonistic Memory" provided the theoretical framework for the analysis. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's work (2005, 2013), the authors distinguish three memorial regimes: antagonistic, cosmopolitan, and agonistic. Antagonistic memory landscapes, revolving around adversarial contrapositions of friends/foes, heroes/villains, and good/evil, dominated the scene in Europe before World War II and well into the second half of the twentieth century, at a time when memory politics underpinned nationalist governments. In the 1980s, however, also under the influence of European integration, memory politics started to move toward cosmopolitanism (Levy and Sznaider 2002). Since the 1990s, this approach has been extended to Eastern Europe. A cosmopolitan memory discourse promotes empathy with and compassion for the "other" by focusing on the suffering and plight of the victims. However, the more recent rise of populist right-wing movements has seen a revival of antagonistic memory against which the dominant cosmopolitan memory regimes seem helpless. Hence, Cento Bull and Hansen suggest that agonism in memory politics might better be able to counter the rise of right-wing populist movements in Europe, as it engages with sociopolitical emotions and passions, and since it revisits the historical processes and struggles that led to people becoming perpetrators, victims, and bystanders.WP4's key objectives were to establish the dominant memory regimes in selected war museums in contemporary Europe, and assess the possible inclusion of agonistic representations and practices. Hence, researchers analyzed the representations of war in five war museums and aimed at evaluating the reception of their exhibitions among visitors. In what follows, we present the key results of the research undertaken within WP4. First, we briefly introduce our case studies and discuss the methodology that we employed. We then present some results from our comparative analysis focusing on the key question of which memory regimes are dominant within war museums in contemporary Europe and of how the public interacts with such regimes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.