Migration exhibitions and the question of identity: reflections on the history of the representation of migration in Australian museums, 1986-2011

Museums and Migration explores the ways in which museum spaces - local, regional, national - have engaged with the history of migration, including internal migration, emigration and immigration.

The future of the past: digital media in Holocaust museums

This essay critically examines the implications of digital media for the remembrance of the Holocaust in contemporary museum spaces, a development that has seen fundamental shifts in thinking around agency, education and entertainment. Expanding existing discussions of this issue into the Australian context, the essay takes as its central case study the design and integration of interactive StoryPod screen media in Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre. Addressing both the limitations and potentialities of interactive digital technologies for facilitating visitor-viewers’ engagement with survivor stories, the analysis highlights that digital media can be used to complement and enhance – rather than replace – traditional artefact and photographic displays, and will play an integral role in the Holocaust museums of the future.

Toward a pedagogy of feeling: understanding how museums create a space for cross-cultural encounters

In this chapter I engage with two developments – a growing understanding that citizenship involves political activity on the part of citizens in the public sphere and that affective relationships are an important aspect of this activity – to engage with the increasing use of affective interpretation strategies within exhibitions. I argue that the use of these strategies can be understood as the beginning of a new moment in museological practice that is concerned not so much with finding ways to become more pluralistic in who is represented within museums but with building opportunities for cross-cultural encounters in ways that question established relationships between self and other. I call this new moment “a pedagogy of feeling,” marking it as distinctive from both “a pedagogy of walking,” a term used by Tony Bennett to encapsulate the specific exhibition strategies that supported evolutionary narratives, and “a pedagogy of listening,” which I suggest marks the moment when exhibition practices were concerned with finding ways to increase the number of voices found in museum exhibitions as part of a civic program to encourage greater degrees of tolerance. Central to a pedagogy of feeling is, I argue, the idea of a “terrible gift” (as Roger Simon calls it), which is enacted through an exhibition syntax that uses a wide variety of affective or sensorial interpretation strategies.

Book review: marketing and public relations for museums, galleries, cultural and heritage attractions

 The article reviews the book "Marketing and Public Relations for Museums, Galleries, Cultural and Heritage Attractions," by Ylva French and Sue Runyard.

Literature, museums, and national identity; or, why are there so many writers' house museums in Britain?

Writers’ houses constitute the largest and oldest segment of historic house museums dedicated to famous persons in the United Kingdom. Litterateurs tend to ascribe ‘lit houses’ to the ineffable magic of readers’ connections to writers. By contrast, my analysis deploys the analytic of cultural politics to suggest that writers’ house museums can more fully be understood as assertions of national identity. The elision of language with national distinction is subliminal in everyday life, but can be brought to prominence by historicising the nations of the British Isles, and the practice of writing in English.

Mineralogy and chemistry of the green stone artifacts (muiraquitãs) of the museums of the Brazilian State of Pará

Os muiraquitãs foram considerados de proveniência asiática ou, também, como peças esculpidas pelas lendárias mulheres guerreiras, as Amazonas. São peças, hoje, muito raras, encontradas em alguns acervos de Museus. Estudos mineralógicos e químicos de 23 peças do acervo dos Museus de Gemas e do Encontro em Belém, Brasil, mostraram que os muiraquitãs podem ser constituídos, tanto de quartzo, como de albita, ou microclínio, pirofilita, variscita, anortita e tremolita (equivalente ao jade nefrítico), minerais frequentes em formações geológicas do Brasil. No entanto quatro peças são constituídas de jadeíta, ou seja, em jade jadeítico, raro e desconhecido na Amazônia e Brasil. A constatação da presença desse mineral reacende a discussão em torno da origem mineralógica dos muiraquitãs encontrados na Amazônia. Essa origem, antes da atual descoberta, era defendida como amazônica, devido à ausência de jade jadeítico nas peças pesquisadas e pelo fato de jadeíta não ter sido encontrada no Brasil, mas na América Central e na Ásia.