scholarly journals Toward a Critical Children’s Museology: The Anything Goes Exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-351
Author(s):  
Monica Eileen Patterson

For decades, Museum Studies scholars have called for a new ‘critical museology’ with greater inclusion of marginalized communities and diversification of exhibition content, but children have been largely ignored in these efforts. This paper explores the possibilities for what I call a new ‘Critical Children’s Museology’ through in-depth analysis of the Anything Goes exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland in 2016. Curated by 69 children, this ground-breaking exhibition radically broke from current and traditional museological practice by offering prominent institutional space and professional support for children’s cultural production in the form of curated exhibition galleries and programming. I analyze the exhibition, its production process, and its strengths and limitations to consider the possibilities and challenges of bringing child-centred praxis into museology. This work contributes to the larger charge of democratizing museum and curatorial practice by upending the patronizing view of children as passive recipients of museum offerings, focusing instead on their capacities for cultural production, critical interpretation, and curatorial innovation.

Societies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Maayke de Vries

Global citizenship is a popular concept that was fully embraced by UNESCO in 2015 with a framework for Global Citizenship Education (GCE). This pedagogical guidance can be characterized as transformative since it aims to foster reflective citizens who contribute to building a more inclusive, just, and peaceful world. Thus, GCE allows educators to take a critical approach to their teaching, hereby articulating a clear social justice orientation towards citizenship education. However, recent studies indicate that most interpretations and thus implementations of GCE do not translate into a social action approach. Therefore, this article conceptualizes an intersectional approach to GCE, to make a critical approach of GCE more likely by practitioners. Intersectionality was developed by Black feminists in the US, to highlight structural oppressions and privileges on the basis of analytical categories. Intersectionality, furthermore, allows for opportunities to recognize resilience and resistance in marginalized communities. Therefore, an intersectional approach to GCE would develop sensibilities among students to understand global structures of oppression and domination on the basis of analytical categories like race, gender, and class. This knowledge would lead to an awareness of one’s own complicity and shared responsibility, resulting in deliberations and eventually political actions. The overall aim is to provide practitioners with a concrete suggestion of a critical interpretation of GCE, to show its potential as a social justice-orientated framework for educators in especially continental Europe.


Antiquity ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (315) ◽  
pp. 208-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Jordan

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 96
Author(s):  
Anna Wessman ◽  
Xenia Zeiler ◽  
Suzie Thomas ◽  
Pilvi Vainonen

In autumn 2018, eight Museum Studies students from the University of Helsinki had the opportunity to put theory into practice and to gain hands-on experience making a real exhibition. The ‘Museum Content Planning’ course was a collaborative project between the National Museum of Finland and the university in which the students, together with the museum staff, built a pop-up exhibition about the Indian festival Durga Puja in only five weeks. The exhibition showed in the National Museum for two weeks, and the students were involved in most stages of the exhibition’s development. They also blogged about their learning experience. In this case study, we present our reflections on both the benefits and challenges of collaboratively creating an exhibition, which is simultaneously an accredited learning experience for university students.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarsem Lal

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to check the impact of financial inclusion on economic development of marginalized communities through the mediation of socio-economic empowerment.Design/methodology/approachIn order to fulfil the objectives of the study, primary data were collected from 382 bank customers belonging to marginalized communities breathing in Jammu district of J and K by using purposive sampling technique. The data were collected during the month of April–August 2020. Multivariate statistical techniques such as EFA, CFA and SEM were used for data analysis and scale purification.FindingsThe study’s results reveal that financial inclusion has a direct and significant impact on economic development of marginalized communities through the mediation of social and economic empowerment. The study highlights that despite various initiatives taken by the government towards financial inclusion, there is a denial from the financial institutions to extend the credit to the marginalized communities due to lack of education, illiteracy, lack of awareness, attitude of bankers and policy directions to the banking sector, which confine these communities to feel proud, dignified, confident and self-reliant to face any financial crisis.Research limitations/implicationsFirst the in-depth analysis of the study is restricted to Jammu district only that restricts the generalization of the results to the whole population of J and K. Second, the data were collected from respondents belonging to marginalized communities only. Third, comparative study of marginalized households who are covered under the financial inclusion drive and those who are still financially excluded has not been done yet. Fourth, the questionnaire approach was the only way to gather primary data and thus, the results might have a common-method bias.Originality/valueThe study makes contribution in the direction of financial inclusion narrative relating to socio-economic empowerment and economic development of marginalized communities. It looks into how for the socio-economic aspects of marginalized communities influence their exclusion from the financial system of the country. The study also provides valuable insights for the policymakers, researchers and academicians both at the countrywide and intercontinental level to devise and put into practice programmes that will widen right to use financial products and services leading to cutback of poverty incidence, income parity, social and economic empowerment, economic development and reduction in caste and gender based discrimination.


2022 ◽  
pp. 120633122110655
Author(s):  
Diah Kusumaningrum ◽  
Ayu Diasti Rahmawati ◽  
Jennifer Balint ◽  
Nesam McMillan

The collaborative “Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace” project seeks to transform the relational landscape of Yogyakarta by enabling new intergenerational conversations about the 1965 politicide in Indonesia and further injustices with other marginalized communities. This community-engaged project developed walking tours of (largely unacknowledged) sites of historic violence: a colonial fort turned national museum, a derelict office building, a refurbished bank. Through these tours, sites of past suffering are activated by unheard survivor testimonies, making visible historical injustice and its contemporary and enduring significance. Unsettling the dominant spatial arrangement of Yogyakarta, the tours rewrite the city as a space where injustice and persecution are experienced. Crucially, the tour is also a relational encounter, facilitating intergenerational conversations that challenge social and political exclusionary norms. It, thereby, enables a form of relational justice, which requires active involvement from fellow citizens, not solely redress from the state.


Mouseion ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Cayo Honorato

Neste artigo, discutimos o conceito e o posicionamento da museologia pós-crítica, tal como elaborados pelo projeto de pesquisa e programa público Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture (2007-2010), em relação à museologia crítica. Para tanto, analisamos os argumentos registrados na principal publicação resultante do projeto, intitulada Post-critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (2013), assim como alguns títulos dos museum studies, assinados por Tony Bennett (1995), Carol Duncan (1995) e Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1992). O resultado é um quadro comparativo mais nuançado, a partir do qual se pode notar remissões e intersecções, mais do que rupturas definitivas entre essas diferentes perspectivas. Por certo, adotamos essa estratégia na expectativa de melhor registrarmos a especificidade do pós-crítico. Nossa compreensão de que o pós-crítico propõe uma reformulação da crítica, mais do que seu abandono ou superação, levou-nos a destacá-lo como um empreendimento metodológico. Todavia, trata-se de um método que não pode se autoproclamar como tal.


2017 ◽  
pp. 34-60
Author(s):  
Anu Kannike ◽  
Ester Bardone

Kitchen space and kitchen equipment as interpreted by Estonian museums Recent exhibitions focusing on kitchen spaces – “Köök” (Kitchen) at the Hiiumaa Museum (September 2015 to September 2016), “Köök. Muutuv ruum, disain ja tarbekunst Eestis” (The Kitchen. Changing space, design and applied art in Estonia) at the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design (February to May 2016) and “Süüa me teeme” (We Make Food) at the Estonian National Museum (opened in October 2016) – are noteworthy signs of food culture-related themes rearing their head on our museum landscape. Besides these exhibitions, in May 2015, the Seto farm and Peipsi Old Believer’s House opened as new attractions at the Open Air Museum, displaying kitchens from south-eastern and eastern Estonia. Compared to living rooms, kitchens and kitchen activities have not been documented very much at museums and the amount of extant pictures and drawings is also modest. Historical kitchen milieus have for the most part vanished without a trace. Estonian museums’ archives also contain few photos of kitchens or people working in kitchens, or of everyday foods, as they were not considered worthy of research or documentation. The article examines comparatively how the museums were able to overcome these challenges and offer new approaches to kitchens and kitchen culture. The analysis focuses on aspects related to material culture and museum studies: how the material nature of kitchens and kitchen activities were presented and how objects were interpreted and displayed. The research is based on museum visits, interviews with curators and information about exhibitions in museum publications and in the media. The new directions in material culture and museum studies have changed our understanding of museum artefacts, highlighting ways of connecting with them directly – physically and emotionally. Items are conceptualized not only as bearers of meaning or interpretation but also as experiential objects. Kitchens are analysed more and more as a space where domestic practices shape complicated kitchen ecologies that become interlaced with sets of things, perceptions and skills – a kind of integrative field. At the Estonian museums’ exhibitions, kitchens were interpreted as lived and living spaces, in which objects, ideas and practices intermingle. The development of the historical environment was clearly delineated but it was not chronological reconstructions that claimed the most prominent role; rather, the dynamics of kitchen spaces were shown through the changes in the objects and practices. All of the exhibits brought out the social life of the items, albeit from a different aspect. While the Museum of Applied Art and Design and the Estonian Open Air Museum focused more on the general and typical aspects, the Hiiumaa Museum and the National Museum focused on biographical perspective – individual choices and subjective experiences. The sensory aspects of materiality were more prominent in these exhibitions and expositions than in previous exhibitions that focused on material culture of Estonian museums, as they used different activities to engage with visitors. At the Open Air Museum, they become living places through food preparation events or other living history techniques. The Hiiumaa Museum emphasized the kitchen-related practices through personal stories of “mistresses of the house” as well as the changes over time in the form of objects with similar functions. At the Museum of Applied Art and Design, design practices or ideal practices were front and centre, even as the meanings associated with the objects tended to remain concealed. The National Museum enabled visitors to look into professional and home kitchens, see food being prepared and purchased through videos and photos and intermediated the past’s everyday actions, by showing biographical objects and stories. The kitchen as an exhibition topic allowed the museums to experiment new ways of interpreting and presenting this domestic space. The Hiiumaa Museum offered the most integral experience in this regard, where the visitor could enter kitchens connected to one another, touch and sense their materiality in a direct and intimate manner. The Open Air Museum’s kitchens with a human face along with the women busy at work there foster a home-like impression. The Applied Art and Design Museum and the National Museum used the language of art and audiovisual materials to convey culinary ideals and realities; the National Museum did more to get visitors to participate in critical thinking and contextualization of exhibits. Topics such as the extent to which dialogue, polyphony and gender themes were used to represent material culture in the museum context came to the fore more clearly than in the past. Although every exhibition had its own profile, together they produced a cumulative effect, stressing, through domestic materiality, the uniqueness of history of Estonian kitchens on one hand, and on the other hand, the dilemmas of modernday consumer culture. All of the kitchen exhibitions were successful among the visitors, but problems also emerged in connection with the collection and display of material culture in museums. The dearth of depositories, disproportionate representation of items in collections and gaps in background information point to the need to organize collection and acquisition efforts and exhibition strategies in a more carefully thought out manner and in closer cooperation between museums.


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