Julian, a white woman, is an anti-racism writer and facilitator (who, with Cheryl Garvey designed and delivered the Museums Association programme); Rob Lewis is Director of Transformation at Birmingham Museums Trust, a white man and participant on the Museum Associations pilot Anti-Racist Leadership programme in 2024. This conversation offers a personal reflection on coming to understand whiteness for Rob and Julian and took place following the conclusion of the Anti-Racism programme, and from within the construct of whiteness.
This article explores the role of museums in the democratization process using the case of Tunisia. Using several case studies, including the Bardo museum, I illustrate the ways in which museums have been seized upon to shape a new democratic culture of citizenship marked by freedom of expression and civic engagement. It argues that museums, like traditional political institutions such as referendums and parliaments, can act as operators and generators of democracy. The findings highlight both the potential and challenges faced by museums in this transformative role, shedding light on their significance in post-revolution Tunisia, beyond their traditional functions of cultural repositories.
In February 2009, the Museum of Markazi Province’s Luminaries officially opened in Arak, Iran, to honor prominent figures from Markazi Province. The museum, housed in a historic building, displays a number of busts, photographs, and documents related to these luminaries. However, the museum fails to effectively fulfill its intended purpose. This paper seeks to show that the main reason for this failure is unreasonable inclusion and unjust exclusion of figures. The former reason stems from a misunderstanding of Arak’s historical and historical geography, which is related to the etymology of the word ‘Arak’. The ‘unjust exclusion’ is partly due to a lack of clear definition of luminary, and partly as a reflection of the prevalent views of the regime.
Integrating virtual museum experiences into education has gained increasing attention for its potential to enhance students’ critical thinking skills. This study investigates the impact of virtual art museum experiences on fostering critical thinking among elementary school students. Conducted in a formal school setting in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates), the research employs an experimental design to compare the development of critical thinking skills in students exposed to virtual museum environments versus traditional art education methods. The study evaluates a selection of critical thinking skills, including observation, interpretation, evaluation, analysis, association, and creation, examining how virtual tools shape students’ cognitive engagement with artworks. Findings reveal that virtual museum experiences significantly enhance observation, interpretation, and evaluation skills, allowing students to interact more deeply with artworks. However, a decline is noted in analysis, association, and creation, suggesting that certain critical thinking skills require more open-ended and exploratory engagement than virtual platforms may typically provide. The study underscores the importance of balancing structured and exploratory learning approaches in virtual museum designs to optimize educational outcomes. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on the role of digital technologies in museum education and provide insights for educators and museum professionals seeking to integrate virtual learning tools effectively into art education programs.
This article explores the dynamic interplay between Viking character types in popular culture and museum audiences. We examine how pervasive mediated Viking imagery shapes expectations, conceptualizing it as ‘character types’ activated in museum settings. Using qualitative interviews conducted at two Danish museums, we identify six dominant ‘Viking character types’: The Warrior, The Monster, The Explorer/Craftsman, The Feminist, The Style Icon and The Non-Playing Character. Our findings show that audiences negotiate the tension between popular constructions of the past and historical scholarship, often expressing embarrassment, criticism or rejection of fictional content. This highlights the Viking as an ‘open construction’ – a flexible character type that audiences fill with meaning. It is crucial for museums to understand these appropriations to effectively engage a public influenced by mediated fictions and develop polyphonic exhibition strategies that bridge fantasy and history in ways that are both compelling and historically grounded.
In order to address the wide range of offensive, biased, and outdated language can be found in catalogue records, cultural heritage institutions are engaging in the practice of ‘critical cataloguing’, an umbrella term which refers to ways of working critically with catalogue data. Significant bodies of literature exist on critical cataloguing in libraries and archives, and much has been written about decolonization work in museums more generally, but relatively little is known about how museums are engaging in critical cataloguing. This paper brings together available information on critical cataloguing in museums for the first time, and extends this review with the findings of a series of interviews conducted with two dozen critical cataloguing practitioners in order to characterize museum-based critical cataloguing through a taxonomy of the kinds of projects and project-independent work actions that make up critical cataloguing practice in museums.
The article argues that Austrian Expressionism, exemplified by the works in the Psyche and Provocation exhibition room at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere (The Austrian Gallery) in Vienna, provides a compelling case for studying art experience due to its emotional intensity and radical aesthetics. By integrating Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura with Eric Kandel’s insights from brain and cognitive sciences, the study explores how the experience of these artworks is shaped by their materiality, spatial context, and the viewer’s potential psychological engagement. This analysis contributes to debates on authenticity, the role of museums and the evolving nature of visitor experience in the (post-)digital age. Further, it highlights the continued relevance of Benjamin’s aura concept while integrating contemporary cognitive perspectives on art perception.
A review of the following two books: Rebecca Louise-Clarke, Museum Representations of Motherhood and the Maternal: Mother Stuff, Abdingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2024, ISBN 978-1-032-10638-0, Hardback £54.99; paperback £21.99, pp.109. Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021, ISBN 978-0-262-04489-9, Hardback £36, pp.344.
This article examines how military museums in Canada represent Britishness. As a former British colony, Canadian government agencies have long emulated British institutions. Britishness as well as The Royal Family played a central role in Canadian culture throughout the first half of the 20th century, including in the military. We examine how military museums depict the relationship between Britain and Canada and the effect of representations of Queen Elizabeth in these museums displays. Our analysis examines the way Canadian identity has been constituted vis-à-vis Britain’s over time and how this process of forging nationalism plays out in the military context. We argue that these museums depict a militaristic nationalism located in an in-between space of the nation. The representations in these museums align themselves neither with old Britain and its colonial consciousness, nor with new Canada and the contemporary political tension between settler and Indigenous groups. Instead, the museums depict Canada as a fraught member of the British Commonwealth, accountable neither to the crown nor to the othered groups within its borders. This analysis raises questions about the function of this nationalism depicted in military museums and the symbolic purpose of the British-Canadian relationship portrayed in these spaces.
The discussion around social media communication in museums is still relevant as this is related, e.g., to the changes observed in museum management. The research area consists of communication forms (one-way or two-way, interactive), modes of shaping relations, and tendencies toward using specific social media platforms. Museum-oriented studies are closely connected to the broader environmental situation, like new social media platforms or audience characterization. This article explores the forms of activity and communication patterns made by the Polish museums on TikTok. The study is based on qualitative and quantitative content analysis of social media posts. Results revealed that although TikTok is still a novelty, institutions use this platform for various purposes. This platform is used not only by artistic museums but also by historical and military ones. Informal, humoristic communication tends to be dominant, yet TikTok is also used to educate the users.
As the global population ages, fostering psychological well-being and personal agency among older adults is becoming increasingly important. This study investigated the potential of participatory art-making and public exhibitions in enhancing self-efficacy among older adults. The My Canvas project involved twenty-one older adults (aged 60–78 years) in a small-group self-portrait art workshop, culminating in a public gallery exhibition. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining pre- and post-program surveys with in-depth interviews. The quantitative results showed a statistically significant increase in self-efficacy, particularly in the participants’ perceived ability to overcome challenges. The qualitative findings revealed five key themes: self-reflection, social connection, confidence development, sense of achievement, and openness to new challenges. Collectively, these outcomes highlight the value of creative engagement and public recognition in enhancing older adults’ sense of identity, personal agency, and emotional well-being. This study contributes to the growing body of evidence that museum- and gallery-based programs can serve as effective, non-clinical interventions to support quality of life in the older adults.
In this article, I explore how queer heritage can be created in museums through fragments. I apply the concept of reparative curating to demonstrate how fragmented heritage can be ‘patched up’ and mapped through affective means. I examine this in the context of an exhibition at the Helsinki City Museum called M/S Baltic Queers – Experiences of LGBTQAI+ Migration. Through interviews, observation, and by using the exhibition as research material, I analyze how affective strategies can be employed to produce an exhibition centred on the cultural heritage of a marginalized group, and how this approach can be reparative. There is a pressing need for history among queer individuals, yet the material available is often fragmented due to systemic oppression, which means that more creative means are often necessary when constructing exhibitions. The everyday objects, clarity of queerness, and affective modes of engagement featured in the exhibition contribute to its reparative nature. By exhibiting fragments alongside stories and narratives, it becomes possible to create a fully rounded presentation of a phenomenon that has not been widely discussed before.
Communities & Crowds is an AHRC-funded (2021-24) collaborative project between volunteer researchers and staff at the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, National Museum of Scotland, and Zooniverse teams at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium, Chicago. The Communities & Crowds team used an action research approach to test out how local in-person volunteer researchers might be supported within a cultural heritage institution (CHI) to lead the development and creation of a crowdsourcing project relevant to their own interests and aspirations. In this article we use the Communities & Crowds experiments at the National Science and Media Museum as a case study to draw out how co-creation and action research can be brought together with online crowdsourcing to enrich volunteering experiences and institutional knowledge about GLAM photographic collections. We argue that the careful co-creation of bespoke spaces for conversation and critical reflection were essential to the successful realisation of an online crowdsourcing project on the platform Zooniverse.
As we grapple with human impact on the environment in the period now referred to as the Anthropocene, natural history collections are accruing new meaning. Nowhere is this more relevant than in relation to the display of extinct species. In this article I consider the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) and will examine what the display of this carnivorous marsupial in Paris tells us about the potentialities of natural history collections inengaging the public to confront extinction. This article will follow the thylacine through the various spaces of the Natural History Museum in Paris. It will first consider the historical display of the thylacine in the Ménagerie and the Jardin des Plantes La Salle des Espèces Menacées et des Espèces Disparues (Room of Extinct and Endangered Species). I will then turn to newer modalities of diaplay such as the augmented reality experience, Revivre, in which extinct animals are reanimated, and the Dodo Manège, a carousel where you can ride on extinct and endangered animals. Arguing for a complex affective repetoir, this article examines the value of a range of emotions for confronting extinction in museum spaces.
The Scandinavian countries have a unique ‘association culture’ - not least in a museum and heritage context. The association culture has been an important driver for social capital and social sustainability, with museums playing a significant role. Whether these associations are social interest groups, sporting clubs, or museum associations, they adhere to formal procedures. However, young adults tend to be less willing to engage in the structures of traditional associations, including volunteer communities. Nonetheless, young adults still seek communities, albeit in new forms and contexts. What happens when you mix such trends with the repurposing of heritage from a former psychiatric hospital? The project MIND the Community aims to build a new type of community for young adults. The project centres around repurposing the heritage of a psychiatric hospital with the purpose of creating a vibrant heritage community eager to engage with juvenile challenges such as mental health. • Community • Young people • Museum • Repurposing of heritage
The video game Black Myth: Wukong ignited the public’s interest in the cultural heritage sites featured in the game scenes. Players entered into a virtual game world of Chinese traditional mythologies contextualized in an imagined landscape - the design of which drew inspiration from real-world heritage sites. By examining an exhibition of the game and the status quo of two heritage sites in Shanxi, this article captures and reflects upon the game’s impact on the sites’ engagement with their contemporary audiences. It finds that while the game greatly promoted the sites to a broader audience group, it also reshaped the cultural functions of the sites, as they have now become viral travel destinations.
This article is about a museum and its city. During the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, the Philadelphia Black Docents Collective (BDC), based at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) decided that if the museum could not open, they would continue their work in other ways. Using the city as a ‘living archive’ they led tours, gave talks and produced online resources. Our focus is on BDC’s claim that by sharing the history of black Philadelphia they can instigate a process of healing. Our aim here is to understand their specifically urban imaginaries of healing. After introducing AAMP and the BDC, we point to Philadelphia’s historical racial wounds. We then discuss the healing activities of BDC before finally critically discussing the recognition and redistribution-based urban imaginaries of healing invoked in these activities.
This article considers the persistence of 'cabinet of curiosities' style museums in French Guiana, France’s largest overseas département [department], within the wider context of decolonizing agendas found in mainland France and the Global North more generally. The central claim is that it is impossible to truly engage in decolonial praxis in places where colonial forms of governance still exist. It also suggests that to understand how and why the museum cannot fully be decolonized requires moving focus from institutions found in metropolitan centres to those located at the peripheries. Two museums will provide the focus of the analysis here – the Musée Alexandre Franconie in Cayenne and the Musée du Planeur Bleu in Cacao. The article will explore the ongoing local popularity of these museums where other larger scale 'postcolonial' museum projects have failed or stalled. The article will conclude by suggesting that while there do exist examples of museography in French Guiana that offer alternatives to both types of project, these are limited in scope and public engagement.
This review aimed to explore and synthesize the benefits that museum programmes offer to caregivers of people with life-limiting illnesses, and to critically assess the level of support provided in light of the attention to an alternative public health approach of EoLC. In pursuit of this goal, systematic searches were conducted in various databases. According to the PRISMA guidelines, this resulted in 11 unique entries. The benefits identified across studies were associated with cognitive, social, and particularly psychological benefits for caregivers, especially those caring for people with dementia. However, none of the studies investigated long-term benefits. Therefore, future research is needed to allow for a more robust synthesis of findings and to maximize benefits and minimize risks, ensuring that these programmes become more widely available to caregivers of people with life-limiting illnesses.
