Cod, curtains, planes and experts: Relational materialities in the museum

Abstract

Museums are sites where people encounter material objects. This article examines object and subject entanglements that take place at a university museum in northern Norway, and illustrates how objects shift identities as they interact with subjects and how subjects are also affected by the encounter. A relational materialities perspective, which demonstrates how object identity is related to the subject it engages with, allows multiple versions of objects to appear. Working as a certified expert in the university museum, the author aims to address the quandary over future museum collection policies. She argues that collection policies are not only about what to select but also who makes the selection decisions, and the perspectives associated with such choices. If museum collections are based on expert relationships to objects, the quality of the expert needs further investigation.

Resisting Institutional Power: The Women of St. Barnabas

“…In the museum context, an individual's preexisting, ontological perspectives can influence which identity of an object will be enacted. According to Maurstad (2012), It is a type of knowledge politics performed by subjects in direct material engagement with things, but without clear political intent. The politics is situated in practices, procedures and rules of engagement between entities.…”

“This is where we do it!”. Materiality, family, and musealization in second homes

“…In return, as museum objects, they become part of collections, research, and communication. Situated in mutually constitutive relations with museum expertise, they perform versions of the world (Maurstad 2012). Even house-museums, which endeavor to avoid physically de-contextualizing museum materiality from its former relations by preserving the "original assemblages" (Young 2007:73) and "the lived context of the commemorated life" (Hancock 2010:14), work to tell stories that were not told by the previous inhabitants in everyday life.…”

“…Researchers have also analyzed the significance of objectexpert entanglements to the constitution of knowledge in museums (e.g. Mordhorst 2009;Maurstad, 2012) and have found that complex interplays between discursive and material elements knit museum exhibitions together (e.g. Macdonald 2002;Yaneva, 2003).…”

Where Pop Meets Purl: Knitting, the Curation of Craft, and the Folk/Mass Culture Divide

“…Within the last twenty years, curation studies have drawn attention to the growing and combined importance of new technology, new constituencies, and new ways of thinking about the role of museums in society (Dubuc ; Thomas, ). As a consequence, attention has shifted from older debates about which objects should and should not be conserved within museum collections (Etherington ; Welsh ) to broader deliberations on the role and geographies of curation in an interconnected and relational society (Cairns ; Dubuc ; Hooper‐Greenhill ; Maurstad ). For example, Peers and Brown () saw the museum as a curatorial “contact zone”, defined as a place that source community members and other stakeholders enter for consultation, collaboration, and conflict resolution over issues such as storage, conservation, and access.…”