Hetherington, Open University, UK
Jim McGuigan, Loughborough University, UK
Scott McQuire, University of Melbourne, Australia
Kylie Message, Australian National University, Australia
Toby Miller, Cardiff University, UK, and Murdoch University, Australia
Howard Morphy, Australian National University, Australia
Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne, Australia
Elsa Peralta, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Natalia Radywyl, Fjord, New York
Philipp Schorch, Deakin University, Australia, and Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany
Laurajane Smith, Australian National University, Australia
Russell Staiff, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Fredrik Svanberg, National Historical Museums, Sweden
Sheila Watson, University of Leicester, UK
Andrea Witcomb, Deakin University, Australia
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Editing this volume has been an enormously rewarding experience. We wish to thank all those who made it possible, particularly our friend Chris Healy, who first brought us into this project. We would also like to thank Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy, who conceptualized the series and have overseen its develop? ment. As our guiding editor, Sharon was exacting but enormously supportive, and we thank her for it. We also warmly acknowledge our contributors–colleagues inside and outside museums without whom this volume would not have taken shape. Thank you for staying the course of the project–all those emails backward and forward, the drafting and redrafting that went into the editing process, and your faith that the publication would eventually emerge. Finally but not least, we wish to thank Gill Whitley, the project manager working with Wiley, who went above and beyond her duty of care in supporting us as editors, running around chasing copyright, and keeping us to deadlines or managing requests for exten? sions when we needed them. We are also no less grateful for the patience, careful reading, and extraordinary care taken by our copy?editor, Jacqueline Harvey
EDITORS’ PREFACE TO MUSEUM THEORY AND THE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS IN MUSEUM STUDIES
Museum Theory
As general editors of The International Handbooks in Museum Studies, we–Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy–are delighted that Museum Theory is now appearing in paperback, as a self-standing volume. So too are the other volumes, which is testament to the strength of these volumes individually, as well as collectively, and to the importance of the issues that they each address. Museum Theory clearly concerns a fundamental area of museum studies. Although fundamental, however, there is not an established consensus on precisely what might be covered under the label ‘museum theory’. One reason for this is the relative recency of museum studies as a field. A second reason is that museum studies draws on a wide range of disciplines, each themselves renewing their toolkits in various ways, resulting in new impulses for museum theorising too. In addition, and perhaps of most significance, is the fact of change–and calls for more change–within museums themselves as they seek to address wider social and cultural transformations. This inspires a search for fresh theorising to understand and shape new developments. At the same time, as museums can be seen as themselves ‘theorisers’, it helps to propel new theorizing.
As such, the editors of Museum Theory, Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message, in consultation with us as general editors, faced a task of how to achieve a volume that would cover approaches that have become central to the theorising of museums, while also being sure to include as much as possible of the new directions and ideas that have been emerging in recent years. That this was achieved so well is evident from the resulting volume. The range of topics included and the ways in which they are tackled, provide a sound and also cutting-edge coverage of museum theory.
The International Handbooks in Museum Studies
Collectively, The International Handbooks in Museum Studies include over a hundred original, state-of-the-art chapters on museums and museum studies. As such, they are the most comprehensive review to date of the lively and expanding field of museum studies. Written by a wide range of scholars and practitioners–newer voices as well as those already widely esteemed–The International Handbooks provide not only extensive coverage of key topics and debates in the museum field, but also make a productive contribution to emerging debates and areas, as well as to suggest how museum studies–and museums–might develop in the future.
The number of excellent contributors able and willing to write on museum topics is itself testimony to the state of the field, as was recognition by the publishers that the field warranted such a substantial work. Bringing together such a range and quantity of new writing about museums was accomplished through the deep knowledge, extensive networks, and sheer labour of the volume editors–Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message, Museum Theory; Conal McCarthy, Museum Practice; Michelle Henning, Museum Media; and Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Transformations. All enthusiastically took up the mandate to go out and recruit those they thought would be best able to write useful and timely essays on what they defined as the most important topics within their area of remit. Their brief was to look widely for potential contributors, including unfamiliar, as well as familiar, names. We–and they–were especially interested in perspectives from people whose voices have not always been heard within the international museum studies conversation thus far. This breadth is also a feature of the expanded and expanding field itself, as we explain further below.
Diversification anddemocratization
The editors of the four volumes that constitute The International Handbooks are based in four different countries–Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada; and contributors have their institutional homes in over a dozen more. Yet these numbers alone do not fully convey the trend to diversification that we see in these volumes, and in museum studies more widely. “Internationalization” is a term that might be used but does not, we think, adequately characterize what is involved. Certainly, there is more traffic between nations of ideas about museums and about how to study them. Debates travel from one part of the globe to another, with museums and exhibitions in one location being used as models for emulation or avoidance in another. The massive expansion of professional training in museum studies that has taken place over the past three decades helps establish a shared discourse, not least as many students study away from their home countries or those in which they will later work. So too do texts in and about the field, certain key ones often being found on reading lists in numerous countries and also republished in successive readers. Such developments establish the basis for a conversation capable of transcending borders.
It is evident from the contents of The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, however, that the democratization runs deeper than the traffic of discourse and practice across national borders, and, in
