This volume combines some of the most influential published research in this emerging field with newly commissioned essays on the issues, problems and lessons involved in collaborating museums and source communities. Focusing on museums in the UK, North America and the Pacific, the book highlights three areas which demonstrate the new developments most clearly: the museum as field site or 'contact zone' - a place which source community members enter for purposes of consultation and collaboration visual repatriation - the use of photography to return images of ancestors, historical moments and material heritage to source communities exhibition case studies - these are discussed to reveal the implications of cross-cultural and collaborative research for museums, and how such projects have challenged established attitudes and practices. As the first overview of its kind, this collection will be essential reading for museum staff working with source communities, for community members involved with museum programmes, and for students and academics in museum studies and social anthropology.

Using case studies drawn from all areas of museum studies, Museums and their Communities explores the museums as a site of representation, identity and memory, and considers how it can influence its community. Focusing on the museum as an institution, and its social and cultural setting, Sheila Watson examines how museums use their roles as informers and educators to empower, or to ignore, communities. Looking at the current debates about the role of the museum, she considers contested values in museum functions and examines provision, power, ownership, responsibility, and institutional issues. This book is of great relevance for all disciplines as it explores and questions the role of the museum in modern society.

This volume combines some of the most influential published research in this emerging field with newly commissioned essays on the issues, problems and lessons involved in collaborating museums and source communities. Focusing on museums in the UK, North America and the Pacific, the book highlights three areas which demonstrate the new developments most clearly: the museum as field site or 'contact zone' - a place which source community members enter for purposes of consultation and collaboration visual repatriation - the use of photography to return images of ancestors, historical moments and material heritage to source communities exhibition case studies - these are discussed to reveal the implications of cross-cultural and collaborative research for museums, and how such projects have challenged established attitudes and practices. As the first overview of its kind, this collection will be essential reading for museum staff working with source communities, for community members involved with museum programmes, and for students and academics in museum studies and social anthropology.

Using case studies drawn from all areas of museum studies, Museums and their Communities explores the museums as a site of representation, identity and memory, and considers how it can influence its community. Focusing on the museum as an institution, and its social and cultural setting, Sheila Watson examines how museums use their roles as informers and educators to empower, or to ignore, communities. Looking at the current debates about the role of the museum, she considers contested values in museum functions and examines provision, power, ownership, responsibility, and institutional issues. This book is of great relevance for all disciplines as it explores and questions the role of the museum in modern society.

This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.

In remote areas of Europe, local history museums struggle to connect with the rapidly changing and increasingly diverse communities around them. Insa Müller asks how these museums can recast themselves to strengthen the links to their communities. Combining theoretical deliberations, empirical investigations of the case of two Norwegian islands and a museum experiment, she offers starting points for rethinking the local history museum, while at the same time providing suggestions for locally adapted museum practice.

The museum has become a vital strategic space for negotiating ownership of and access to knowledges produced in local settings. Museum as Process presents community-engaged "culture work" of a group of scholars whose collaborative projects consider the social spaces between the museum and community and offer new ways of addressing the challenges of bridging the local and the global. Museum as Process explores a variety of strategies for engaging source communities in the process of translation and the collaborative mediation of cultural knowledges. Scholars from around the world reflect upon their work with specific communities in different parts of the world – Australia, Canada, Ghana, Great Britain, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, South Africa, Taiwan and the United States. Each global case study provides significant insights into what happens to knowledge as it moves back and forth between source communities and global sites, especially the museum. Museum as Process is an important contribution to understanding the relationships between museums and source communities and the flow of cultural knowledge.