Books in the Museum Meanings series

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.

Over recent decades, many museums, galleries and historic sites around the world have enjoyed large-scale investment in their capital infrastructure; in building refurbishments and new gallery displays. The period has also seen the creation of a series of new purpose-built museums and galleries, and a fundamental reinvention in the design and shaping of museums. Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions explores this re-making through a focus on the inherently spatial character of narrative and storytelling and their potential to connect with human perception and imagination.

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.

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.

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.

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 volume considers in depth the most up-to-date approaches to museum communication - museums as media, museums and audience and the evaluation of museums.

Museums, Society, Inequality brings together diverse perspectives from across the globe to explore the wide-ranging social roles and responsibilities of the museum.

Brings together the views of an international group of museum professionals, architects, designers and academics, highlights the complexity, significance and malleability of museum space, and provides reflections upon developments in museum architecture and exhibition design.

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

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.

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.