Haunted Intimacy: Spectral and Vital Space within a Historic House Museum

Merchant’s House Museum is haunted. While it functions as a historic house museum in Manhattan, the house remains the home of the Tredwell family who now appear as ghosts. For the museum, these ghosts become animating presences, continuing to keep the everyday things of the house embedded in the intimate space of a family’s home. Throughout this article, I explore how those connected to the house as staff, visitors, and volunteers present the ghosts of the Tredwells and, based on these peoples’ experiences, I examine the Tredwell house within a museological framework of, what I term, haunted intimacy, that keeps the house in vital relation to the family.

'All Will be Amply Labelled…' The Educational Policies and Practices of the Horniman Free Museum

This work examines the policies and educational programming produced by the Horniman Free Museum in London prior to its closure in 1898. Relying upon primary sources, such as the writings of tea merchant and Member of Parliament Frederick Horniman and the staff of the museum, this article refutes previous scholarship on this museum and argues that the museum possessed a clear mission, curatorial and exhibition practices, and educational practices that were derived from late nineteenth-century museum practices and theory. By examining how the Horniman Free Museum created and described its policies and programming, this article presents a basis for further work on understanding how late nineteenth-century museums interpreted museum theory for constructing and displaying knowledge about the world.

Uses of Oral History in Museums: A Tool for Agonism and Dissonance or Promoting a Linear Narrative?

This paper explores the potential for the deployment of oral history in the museum space to challenge hegemonic narratives on the past and enhance multivocality. Following an overview of the general merits of oral history and debates about its use in museums, we set out the arguments in favour of combining such an approach with the notion of agonistic memory. We then move to a comparative analysis between the Schindler’s Factory exhibition in Krakow and the Voices of 68 project at National Museums NI’s Ulster Museum, Belfast to explore the limitations and benefits of digital storytelling as a tool for disrupting linear narratives. In so doing, this article showcases and explains the potency of combining oral history with agonism in encouraging radical multiperspectivity that takes representations of the past beyond the curtailed benefits engendered by approaches focussed on multivocality alone.

Promoting Social Justice through Storytelling in Museums

In 2018 the Anthropology Museum at California State University San Bernardino (USA) opened an exhibition entitled In|Dignity. The collaborative endeavour combined social science techniques, documentary photography, and theatre performances to present first person narratives of 43 community members. Participants represented marginalized demographics and intersectional identities that extended far beyond standardized approaches to ‘diversity’. Their stories provided an intimate look into experiences of discrimination, microaggressions, harassment, exclusion, and other affronts to self-worth and barriers to community belonging. This article argues that connecting individuals through telling and listening to stories is a valid strategy to promote social justice. In|Dignity provides one case study of a museum using the narrative form and the processes of exhibition development to disrupt power hierarchies, uplift community concerns, and promote human dignity.

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

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.

The Lives and Deaths of an Ethnographic Museum: History, Violence and Curatorial Collaborations in Guinea-Bissau

This article discusses the history of the National Ethnographic Museum of Guinea-Bissau (West Africa) and an exhibition we curated about it in Bissau in 2017, which serendipitously led to its reopening. The Museum, which was created in 1988, had ceased to exist because of a civil war in 1998-99. Thanks to a reconstruction of contact prints in the archives of Bissau, we were able to organize an exhibition and to conduct research on the history of the museum. Methodologically, the article illustrates the potential of photography in museum historiography and revitalization. Thematically, it exemplifies the history of museography in West Africa from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, the role of museums in the creation of national heritage, and, by looking at the present situation of the Museum at stake, the fragile place that ethnographic museums have in the politics of culture in today’s Africa.

Object Biographies and Museums: 100 X Congo in Antwerp, Exhibition at the Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp, Belgium, 3 October 2020 - 12 September 2021

The Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) in Antwerp, Belgium, opened the doors of its long-anticipated exhibition, 100 X Congo, on 3 October 2020, highlighting the presence of a Congolese art collection that has been owned by the city for a hundred years (1920-2020). Tackling the often uneasy history of how these things ended up in museums in the colonial ‘motherland’, this exhibition signals a step forwards in museology in Belgium, away from mere aestheticism of Congolese and, by extension, African arts, towards, in contrast, a focus on provenance, context and cultural importance.

Exhibiting Refugee Routes: Contemporary Collecting as Memory Politics

In recent years, numerous European museums have collected objects related to refugees. This article examines the Flight for Life (På Flugt) exhibition (2017), which the National Museum of Denmark organized based on a contemporary collecting project that took place in Greece and Denmark in 2016. Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory is made use of here to examine how the exhibition invited visitors to identify with refugees. This empathetic approach had political potential by promoting solidarity with refugees. However, it did not open up a broader contextualization of the collected objects in terms of the migration policies of Denmark and the European Union. This article argues that museums, through contemporary collecting projects of the refugee reception crisis, engage in memory politics by framing how Europe will be able to make sense of the refugee reception crisis of the early twenty-first century.

Theorizing Born Digital Objects: Museums and Contemporary Materialities

This paper explores the characteristics of born digital objects and how their materiality is framed and transformed in the musealization process. It draws on vibrant materialism and web archiving, framing born digital objects as assemblages and proposing a distinction between these and reborn digital objects, i.e. their collected counterparts. The paper relates this new framing of digital objects to established museological frameworks, such as analyses of the musealization process through the lenses of semiotics and research on authenticity in relation to digital reproductions, in order to unpick the ontological and epistemological transformation this contemporary form of heritage undergoes in entering the museum.