Books in the Museum Meanings series

Museums and the Working Class is the first book to take an intersectional and international approach to the issues of economic diversity and class within the field of museum studies.

Museums and the Working Class is the first book to take an intersectional and international approach to the issues of economic diversity and class within the field of museum studies.

Using examples of indigenous models from Indonesia, the Pacific, Africa and Native North America, Kreps illustrates how the growing recognition of indigenous curation and concepts of cultural heritage preservation is transforming conventional museums.

Museums are rarely acknowledged in the global discussion of climate change, environmental degradation, the inevitability of depleted fossil fuels, and the myriad local issues concerning the well-being of particular communities - suggesting the irrelevance of museums as social institutions. This book explores the meaning and role of museums.

Drawing upon a range of professional and theoretical sources, this book offers a history of museum computing. It attempts to explain a series of tensions between curatorship and the digital realm and reveals how the sector has experienced a broadening of participation, and a widening of creative horizons.

Explores the dynamics of the relationship between the community and the museum. This work examines one of the museum's primary responsibilities - working with different communities and using collections to encourage people to learn about their own histories, and to understand other people's.

Explores the ways diverse natural history museum audiences imagine their evolutionary heritage. This book considers how the meanings constructed by audiences of museum exhibitions are a product of dynamic interplay between museum iconography and powerful images museum visitors bring with them to the museum.

The prioritisation of learning in museums in the context of demands for social justice and cultural democracy combined with cultural policy based on economic rationalism forces museums to review their educational purposes, redesign their pedagogies and account for their performance. This book reveals the power of museum pedagogy.

Interdisciplinary in approach, this book presents interpretations of museum history and practices. The text discusses museums in terms of their relationship with the media and their role in modern society.

Answering key questions in the study of how museums communicate, this book provides a set of frameworks to investigate the complexities of communication in museums. It argues that communication contributes to what a museum is, who it relates to, and what it stands for. It is useful for students of museum studies and communications studies.

This important new work explores how evolutionary museums developed in the USA, UK, and Australia in the late 19th century.

As well as providing a theoretical basis to museum education, this volume serves as a practical guide for all museum professionals on how to adapt their museums to maximise the educational experience of every visitor.

This is a multi-disciplinary study that adopts an innovative and original approach to a highly topical question, that of meaning-making in museums.

Curating Under Pressure breaks the silence surrounding curatorial self-censorship and shows that it is both endemic to the practice and ubiquitous. Contributors map the diverse forms such self-censorship takes and offer creative strategies for negotiating curatorial integrity.

Curating Under Pressure breaks the silence surrounding curatorial self-censorship and shows that it is both endemic to the practice and ubiquitous. Contributors map the diverse forms such self-censorship takes and offer creative strategies for negotiating curatorial integrity.

Museums and Social Change explores the ways museums can work in collaboration with marginalised groups to work for social change and, in so doing, re-think the museum.

Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism examines the role of exhibitionary institutions in representing LGBTQ+ people, cisgender women, and nonbinary individuals.

Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism examines the role of exhibitionary institutions in representing LGBTQ+ people, cisgender women, and nonbinary individuals.

Museums and Sites of Persuasion examines the concept of museums and memory sites as locations that attempt to promote human rights, democracy and peace. Demonstrating that such sites may act as powerful spaces of persuasion or contestation, the book also shows that there are perils in the selective history that they present.

Museum Activism elucidates the largely untapped potential for museums as key intellectual and civic resources to address inequalities, injustice and environmental challenges. This makes the book essential reading for scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management and politics.

Museum Activism elucidates the largely untapped potential for museums as key intellectual and civic resources to address inequalities, injustice and environmental challenges. This makes the book essential reading for scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management and politics.

The Future of Museum and Gallery Design explores new research and practice in museum design.

The museum has become a vital strategic space for negotiating ownership of and access to knowledge produced in local settings. This volume 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. Scholars from around the world describe their engagement with communities in Australia, Canada, Ghana, Great Britain, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, South Africa, Taiwan and the United States.

The museum has become a vital strategic space for negotiating ownership of and access to knowledge produced in local settings. This volume 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. Scholars from around the world describe their engagement with communities in Australia, Canada, Ghana, Great Britain, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, South Africa, Taiwan and the United States.