Museology
It explores the history of museums and their role in society, as well as the activities they engage in, including curating, preservation, public programming, and education.
[1] When referring to the day-to-day operations of museums, other European languages typically use derivatives of the Greek "museographia" (French: muséographie, Spanish: museografía, German: Museographie, Italian: museografia, Portuguese: museografia), while English speakers typically use the term "museum practice" or "operational museology"[2] The development of museology in Europe coincided with the emergence of early collectors and cabinets of curiosity in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
In particular, during The Age of Enlightenment anthropologists, naturalists, and hobbyist collectors encouraged the growth of public museums that displayed natural history and ethnographic objects and art in North America and Europe.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, European powers’ colonization of overseas lands was accompanied by the development of the disciplines of natural history and ethnography, and the rise of private and institutional collection building.
[5] In the European context, the first academic journal on museology was the Zeitschrift für Museologie und Antiquitätenkunde sowie verwandte Wissenschaften[6] (Journal for museology and antiquarianism as well as related sciences, 1878–1885) founded and edited by Dr Johann Georg Theodor Graesse [de] (1814–1885), director of Dresden Porcelain Collection at the time.
In 1988, Robert Lumley's book The Museum Time Machine "expressed the growing disquiet about traditional museological presuppositions and operations".
[15][16] Scholars who are engaged in various "new" museological practices sometimes disagree about when this trend "officially" began, what exactly it encompasses, and whether or not it is an ongoing field of study.
[3] Critical theorists like Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Benedict Anderson also had a profound influence on late 20th and early 21st century museology.
Operational museology has shifted in the late 20th and 21st century to position the museum as a central institution that serves the public by informing culture, history, and art while creating space for challenging conversations.
[19] For example, many history museums engage with public memory from a multi-vocal perspective and present critical narratives regarding current sociopolitical issues.
[20] Some museums convey reflexive and critical narratives, while others enact as "mass mediums" oriented toward international tourist networks.
[22] Scholars have identified a recent transformation in the way museums define their functions and produce their programming strategies as these have become spaces for encounters and meaningful experiences.
Critical museology may also extend beyond the traditional museum to include cultural centres, heritage sites, memorials, art galleries, and so on.
[27] Museums, along with their collections – and collectors – played a key role in establishing and reiterating the dominance of colonial Europe and narratives of cultural superiority.
[33] They have also led interdisciplinary working groups that developed new approaches to globalizing processes in critical museology, as foregrounded in Museum Frictions, a third innovative volume co-edited by Ivan Karp.
Australian museums have been leaders in developing repatriation processes, consultation, and collaboration with Indigenous communities, beginning in the late 1980s.
Though repatriation policies are typically well intended, the process has often been complicated by institutional, community, and government politics, and have had varying degrees of success.
[37][49][50][51] Given that museums and their collection strategies are historically linked to patriarchal values and marked by androcentric bias, critical feminist museology has developed as a distinct analytical approach.
With the support of Otto Glöckel of the Vienna City Council the Museum sought to make sociological and economic information accessible to the whole population regardless of their level of education.
The objects in the case included Luna's favorite books and music, his divorce papers, his university degree, photos, and other mementos, alongside labels describing the scars on his body and how he had acquired them.
[68] Similar protests occurred when David Wojnarowicz's film A Fire in My Belly was removed from the Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in 2010.
Nadie sabe quién soy yo was the beginning of a series of curatorial and educational collaborations between Las Guerreras del Centro and the Museum of Antioquia.
[77][78][79] The African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies in Cape Town includes a curatorial module within a comprehensive diploma and M.A.
