Museum and Society
https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas
<p><em>Museum and Society</em> (M&S) is an independent peer-reviewed journal which publishes new writing and research by academics and museum professionals about museums in their social contexts. The journal is both international in scope and at the cutting edge of empirical and theoretical research. Our objective is to explore the museum-society relationship in all its variety by encouraging research that represents the broad spectrum of the social sciences (anthropology, economics, educational studies, human geography, social psychology, and sociology) as well as relevant historical, scientific, and humanistic studies. M&S is interested in how museum practice (past and present) resonates with social issues and problems. In addition, we are interested in how high quality and innovative arguments on museum-centred topics contribute to and perhaps resolve debates within the disciplines themselves. Practitioners and academics such as historians and philosophers with an interest in our vision for museum studies and practice are also invited to join the conversation.</p><p>As a journal, we are committed to diversity in every facet of our work: in selecting editors and reviewers; in publishing articles by a wide variety of authors on a range of appropriate topics; and in seeking a broad readership. We take active measures to achieve these goals. For instance, we conduct research and reach out across our international networks to find reviewers, contributors, and editors. We may offer mentorship to authors from populations and regions that are under-represented in the journal, though ultimately, all articles must go through our rigorous review process. We do not offer translation services, but whenever possible, we assist non-native English speakers to bring promising work to publication. In sum, we aim to balance our adherence to a rigorous review process with a dedication to removing the structural and systemic barriers that often characterize academic publishing.</p><p><em>Museum & Society</em> was launched in March 2003 by Gordon Fyfe, Kevin Hetherington, and Susan Pearce.</p>University of Leicester Open Journalsen-USMuseum and Society1479-8360<p><span>Copyright remains with the author/s of the article/s.</span></p><p>Unless otherwise stated, all articles published in the journal can be re-used under the following CC license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International</span></a>.</p><p>If your article acknowledges funding from UKRI (or sub-councils AHRC, ESRC etc.) then we can accommodate your requirement to publish under a CC-BY licence. Please let the editors know if you have such a requirement well in advance of publication.</p>The Museum as a Choir: Visitor Reactions to the Multivocality at the Humboldt Forum’s Berlin Global Exhibition
https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/4080
<p>The contemporary museum has two contradictory agendas. It is supposed to be a place of dialogue, debate, and even conflict – and it is called upon not to shy away from positioning itself in relation to contemporary discussions, which implies engaging in an activist museum practice and advancing social justice. The current article contributes to the debates on this apparent paradox from an audience studies perspective. Adopting <em>Berlin Global</em>, an exhibition in the newly opened Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Germany, as a case study, it describes the exhibition’s embeddedness in the human rights framework as a choir-like, polyphonic multivocality, seen as a type of multiperspectivity in which a diversity of voices ‘sing’ in unison. Employing ethnography as the methodological approach, the authors analyse visitor reactions to the exhibition’s multiperspectivity and positioning. They demonstrate that some visitors perceive <em>Berlin Global</em> as highly political and even ideological. This leads the authors to join the arguments in favour of ‘agonistic interventions’ that not only potentiate a better balance of multivocality with positioning and thus offer a solution to the aforementioned paradox, but also, they contend, increase the chance of engaging those who would otherwise reject the exhibition.</p>Andrei ZavadskiIrene Hilden
Copyright (c) 2023 Andrei Zavadski, Irene Hilden
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2024-02-052024-02-05213577710.29311/mas.v21i3.4080Understanding the Needs of Institutional Stakeholders in Participatory Cultural Heritage and Social Innovation Projects
https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/4093
<p><span>This article investigates the current practices and needs of institutional actors operating at the intersection of cultural heritage and social innovation. Through a mixed-methods approach that includes a survey and in-depth interviews, responses have been collected from GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums), social enterprises, public administration, cultural and artistic associations, and educational institutes. A key focus is given to exploring cultural-based participatory practices aimed at engaging disadvantaged communities. The article explores problems and barriers hindering quality engagement, beneficial participation, and impactful outputs, as well as collecting instances of good practice, suggestions, and lessons learnt. The overall goal of this work is to outline the lessons learnt from fields of action to develop guidelines and recommendations for facilitating participatory, collaborative, and inclusive cultural heritage initiatives, including when planning for the use and adoption of digital tools and technologies.</span></p>Danilo GiglittoLuigina CiolfiEleanor LockleyFrancesca Cesaroni
Copyright (c) 2023 Danilo Giglitto, Eleanor Lockley, Luigina Ciolfi, Francesca Cesaroni
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2024-02-052024-02-05213789510.29311/mas.v21i3.4093Children’s Wayfaring Experiences at an Olfaction-Enhanced Three Little Pigs Story Exhibition
https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/4102
<p>This study draws on data from a public exhibition that was purposefully designed to engage children’s sense of smell in relation to an adapted version of The Three Little Pigs story at a children’s museum. Twenty-eight children attended the exhibition before official opening and their experiences were documented through researcher-led interviews, children’s drawings and researcher fieldnotes. Narrative hermeneutical analysis revealed that children’s olfactory engagement with the story was associated with the portrayal of good and evil and was fostered through the exhibition’s multisensory display. Children asserted themselves in the identity of wayfarers and engaged with the olfactory elements by criss-crossing personal, shared, literary and olfactory boundaries. The power of olfaction to stimulate idiosyncratic emotional responses came to the fore in children’s appropriation of the story narrative and the shared exhibition space.</p>Natalia Kucirkova
Copyright (c) 2023 Natalia Kucirkova
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2024-02-052024-02-0521312110.29311/mas.v21i3.4102From Crafts to Agency: The Legacy of Colonial Discourses in Exhibiting the Ainu in the Tokyo National Museum and National Museum of Ethnology at Osaka between 1977 and 2017
https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/4324
<p>The Ainu are indigenous groups of people found in Hokkaido and northeast Honshu, Japan. During the nineteenth century, their land was integrated into the Japanese empire and the people redefined and assimilated. While intended to erase the Ainu as distinct groups, policies and discourses also showed that Ainu communities were not accepted as belonging to the category of ‘Japanese’, with the notions that they lacked Japanese ingenuity and civilization, were stuck in a prehistoric past, and lived in <em>terra nullius</em>. These discourses influenced the formation of museums’ collections in Japan, such as the Tokyo National Museum (TNM) and the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka (<em>Minpaku</em>). By offering a reading of exhibitions on the Ainu and their accompanying catalogues between 1977 and 2017, this research sheds light on how colonial legacies continue to be shaped and challenged in representing Ainu communities in museums. The TNM seems unable to challenge tropes of this colonial discourse due to their intricate connection with the government, their notion of political neutrality, and their focus on art that tends to exclude the Ainu from the museum. <em>Minpaku</em>, on the other hand,<em> </em>has tried to introduce notions of cultural relativism and centre cooperation with Ainu communities to facilitate best practices.</p>Edwin Pietersma
Copyright (c) 2023 Edwin Pietersma
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2024-02-052024-02-05213223510.29311/mas.v21i3.4324What Can Museum Anthropology Do in the Twenty-first Century?
https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/4388
<p>This article sets out to tackle the question: ‘what can museum anthropology do in the twenty-first century?’ It does so by focusing on the <em>doing</em> in a double-sense: on what museum anthropology can <em>do</em>, as in affecting, impacting and achieving, as well as on museum anthropology’s own <em>doing</em>, as a particular set of knowledge practices brimming with methodological, epistemological and ontological potentials to be harnessed for its own renewal and for cross-disciplinary fertilization across the academy and beyond the museum itself. The character of the article is programmatic, laying out the program of museum anthropology being developed at LMU Munich, Germany. The article begins by pondering this question explicitly. Then it proceeds by mapping out what has been done, what is being done, and what will be done to address this question at LMU Munich in collaboration with other universities and museums. At the end, the article draws out some of the implications of answering that question for an anthropology not only of and in but <em>through</em> museums, which intervenes in the fields that it studies.</p>Philipp Schorch
Copyright (c) 2023 Philipp Schorch
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2024-02-052024-02-052139611210.29311/mas.v21i3.4388