Making Museums Relevant in a World of Diversity

In this essay I analyse the 'ideas ', 'philosophies', 'contexts' and 'companions' of several recent museum studies anthologies, and examine whether they respond to key issues facing museums today. I am particularly interested in how effectively these anthologies represent social inclusion and diversity discourses, how they account for outreach programs that aim to link museums and communities, and how they engage with the more general work, experience, and critical analysis of museums and museum contexts globally.

Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, 2012

Responding to feminist, postcolonial, and memorialistic critiques, museums have over the past decades radically revised their protocols of collection and display, aiming to register in their own curatorial and pedagogical practice the open and contested nature of the historical and ethnographic narratives on which their object lessons had traditionally conferred the status of hard evidence. In this new emphasis on the “museum encounter” as a performative and intersubjective “event”—sometimes referred to as the “educational turn” in museum curatorship—a new type of “inclusive museum” has emerged in diverse geographical and political settings. The inclusive museum seeks to recover the museum’s social role as a purveyor of shared, collective meanings precisely in departing from its high-modern predecessor and in forging “open representations” that acknowledge the diversity of the interpretative community thus interpolated. Inclusive museums, in short, aim to offer a new, contemporary s...

RECULTURING MUSEUMS: EMBRACE CONFLICT, CREATE CHANGE, 2022

Reculturing Museums takes a unified sociocultural theoretical approach to analyze the many conflicts museums experience in the 21st century. Embracing conflict, Ash asks: What can practitioners and researchers do to create the change they want to see when old systems remain stubbornly in place? Using a unified sociocultural, cultural-historical, activity-theoretical approach to analyzing historically bound conflicts that plague museums, each chapter is organized around a central contradiction, including finances ("Who will pay for museums?"), demographic shifts ("Who will come to museums?"), the roles of narratives ("Whose story is it?"), ownership of objects ("Who owns the artifact?"), and learning and teaching ("What is learning and how can we teach equitably?"). The reculturing stance taken by Ash promotes social justice and equity, 'making change' first, within museums, called inreach, rather than outside the museum, called outreach; challenges existing norms; is sensitive to neoliberal and deficit ideologies; and pays attention to the structure agency dialectic. Reculturing Museums will be essential reading for academics, students, museum practitioners, educational researchers, and others who care about museums and want to ensure that all people have equal access to the activities, objects, and ideas residing in them.

Theorising Museums, 1996

Museums are key cultural loci of our time. They are symbols and sites for the playing out of social relations of identity and difference, knowledge and power, theory and representation. These are issues at the heart of contemporary anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. This volume brings together original contributions from international scholars to show how social and cultural theory can bring new insight to debate about museums.

2001

Her research interests focus on issues of cultural identities within a critical framework, with her recent work directed on questioning what constitutes public pedagogy.

2014

Beyond Pedagogy: Reconsidering the public purpose of museums explores issues standing at the intersection of public pedagogy, memory, and critical theory, focusing on the explicit and implicit educational imperative of art, natural history, and indigenous museums, cultural centers, memorial sites, heritage houses, and other cultural heritage sites that comprise the milieu of educating, learning, and knowing. Taken together, the various essays comprising this book demonstrate that a more nuanced examination of the role of cultural heritage institutions as pedagogical sites requires a critical gaze to understand the function of the authority and ways through which such institutions educate. Beyond Pedagogy also makes a vital point about the complexity of such institutions and the need to comprehend how pedagogy emerges not only as an end result of the museum's educational purpose but also in relation to the historically defined mandates that increasingly come to question the dist...

2003

In her article 'The Politics of exhibiting culture: Legacies and possibilities' Shelley Ruth Butler refers to "a problematic dichotomy that exists in museum literature between critical and optimistic perspectives on exhibiting culture" (BUTLER 2000: 74). Critical museology, she says, raises questions about the relationship between existing museum practice and the history of a "politics of domination" that has underpinned how western museums exhibit non-western cultures, the "other." This has resulted in the re-evaluation of motivations that have driven the collecting, classifying, and displaying of material culture. Optimistic museology, on the other hand, focuses "on the role of museums in public education and in facilitating conversation between diverse and multi-cultural citizens" (BUTLER 2000: 74). The intent of this paper is to discuss how a university museum proved to be the appropriate site of intersection for these two perspect...

Museum Anthropology Review, 2011

Museum Management and Curatorship, 1995