Jinkhin Mongol/True Mongolian: Mongolian museums and the construction of national identity

 This dissertation examined the history of museums in Mongolia and their fate in the post socialist period. The work ultimately identified that while museums have sought to contribute to historical revisionism, they have been heavily influenced by politics, international cultural diplomacy and by popular notions of national identity.

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.

Museums in a troubled world: renewal, irrelevance or collapse?

In the early 2000s the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM), one of Montreal's foremost cultural institutions, underwent two upheavals. First management was thrown into turmoil by the unexpected departure of the OSM's celebrated music director, Charles Dutoit, just as the orchestra and its Swiss conductor were about to mark 25 years of successful partnership with celebrations planned for the 2002-03 season. Then, in May 2005, the orchestra's management and board were faced with a strike by the orchestra's musicians. The authors describe the efforts of the orchestra's general manager, Madeleine Careau, to revive its fortunes, notably through a campaign to restore the OSM's prestige, which had been severely eroded by these two events. With the support of internal and external collaborators, Careau turned her attention to the most pressing issues, namely the choice of a new conductor, the orchestra's planned new concert hall and the creation of a foundation to ensure stable, long-term financing for the OSM. To help bring this recovery plan to fruition, Careau drew on her extensive network of contacts. An all-female leadership team was formed at the OSM, as Careau called on Melanie La Couture (CEO), Helene Desmarais (deputy board chair) and Monique Jérôme-Forget (chair of the Quebec treasury board) to use their talents, expertise and influence to give new lustre to the OSM at home and abroad.

Affect and the politics of testimony in Holocaust museums

In 2010, the Jewish Holocaust Centre (JHC) in Melbourne unveiled its new permanent exhibition, replacing one that had remained, mostly unchanged, for the past twenty years since a major redevelopment in 1990. The former exhibition had received many plaudits from visitors and reviewers for its homespun, intimate aesthetics and display techniques, largely based on photographs (Light, 2002). Central to the JHC’s role as a site of mourning and education, the exhibition included the use of personal testimony from Melbourne’s Holocaust survivors, both in the exhibition displays and through the survivors who ran the museum and shared their stories with individuals and groups. A continuing anxiety over the thirty-year history of the JHC has been the passing of Holocaust survivors. These survivor guides were central to the discourse of a “living museum,” seen as giving the organization its uniqueness compared to other Holocaust institutions as well as other museums generally. Oral survivor testimony was perceived as a key aspect of the museum’s pedagogic potential: The affective encounter with survivors telling their stories while the visitor was viewing the exhibition was identified as having a transformative function, particularly for school-age students who comprised the majority of the visitors. The exhibition redevelopment in 2010 was, in part, a manifestation of that anxiety, with the urgency to incorporate survivor video-testimony increasing as the survivors aged and their memories faded. However, replacing a much-loved exhibition was fraught with difficulties, as the survivors were still very much part of the museum decision-making process. As the JHC had gradually moved from a survivor-volunteer based place of mourning to a professionally run museum with paid employees, there was a need to preserve the voices of the survivors who had been guides at the museum since its opening. Approaching a time when the survivors are not bodily present to share their stories, how might their testimonies still have transformative potential and inform interpretive techniques?

Identity, belonging and cultural diversity in Australian museums

 Karen studied the ways that objects have mediated relationships between people from culturally diverse backgrounds in Australian history and society. She focused on the ways museums, through their collection and display of particular objects, have played a role in supporting processes of inclusion and exclusion in Australian society over time.

Towards reflexive ethnicity: museums as sites of intercultural encounter

In a highly globalised world with increasing ethno-nationalistic tensions and conflicts, the importance of intercultural education has never been greater. The challenge remains, however, as to whether educating for mutual respect and social cohesion can be achieved through traditional modes of schooling or whether additional approaches that are not necessarily school-centric are required. Drawing on in-depth qualitative data including video diaries, narrative interviews and focus groups with Australian secondary school students and semi-structured interviews with teachers, this paper discusses such an endeavour in which a museum exhibition on identity and belonging is employed as an interactive space for meaningful encounter among students and as a form of professional learning that enlivened teaching practice. Using the concept of reflexive ethnicity, this paper examines whether cognitive and affective encounters outside the ‘school gate’ create opportunities for critical learning about ethnicity that can complement and enhance school curricula and classroom learning. More importantly, the paper explores how the possibility of building on such activities to create and sustain teaching practice can challenge entrenched static notions of ethnicity.The paper concludes that reflexive encounters with ‘difference’ within an interactive museum space can unsettle prejudice and provide a deeper and more meaningful understanding of ethnic identity that goes beyond rote classroom learning.