includes contributions by museum practitioners at the cutting edge of museum practice, many of whom are making innovative connections between their practice and current global concerns.
As this overview illustrates, the volume has been devised to offer critical perspectives on the museum (as an institution) and on museums (as a series of individual specificities and contingencies) from a range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. The concerns of our contributors are transnational and the volume includes discussion and analysis of a wide variety of different kinds of museums from various national and local contexts. It is also predominantly contemporary in focus. Although we have not excluded past practices, where they are included they have been investigated and assessed from the vantage point of the present such that the emphasis of contributors has been on identifying how particular moments in theory have impacted on museums; how particular moments in museum practices have been theorized; and what kind of impact these moments have each had on museums. In the following section we elaborate further on our interest inthepolitics of crisis and conjuncture which can lead to contextual, theoretical, and pragmatic changes in the way museums work, and are understood and experienced.
Theoretical positioning
Our response to the challenge of how to balance scholarly and academic rigor with intellectual concerns and forms of practice has been to pay attention to points of conjuncture and the processes by which fragmentation, dissonance, andcrisis occur. These ideas have been influenced by critical theoretical work associated with a variety of disciplinary origins, but acknowledge that the respective “projects” of museum studies and the broader interdisciplinary field of cultural studies have been represented as sharing a range of intellectual and political concerns. For example, anthropologist Eric Gable (2009, 51) suggests that museum studies aligns most closely with cultural studies because the motivating goal of cultural studies is “not only to bring into conscious awareness the extent of misrepresentation that occurs, but also to create representational space for silenced voices to be heard” (see also During 1993, 25). Indeed, new museology, popularized globally from the late 1980s and 1990s, has also responded (through action) to the need reported by cultural studies researchers to “form new kinds of alliances with other sites of knowledge production and political activism” (as advocated by Grossberg 2006, 26) beyond the university sector. And, as already discussed and as subsequently explored through chapters in this book, the resulting collaborations have been characterized as being inclusive of museum professionals, “community” agents, policymakers, as well as other constituents, stakeholders, and audiences, thereby aligning with emergent models of ethical action.2
Rather than being directed by an attempt to map the relationship between museum studies and cultural studies, our starting point was to critically engage with the understanding that disciplinary crisis caused or manifested as dissonance can lead to opportunities for reflection and renewal. This does not mean arguing for an ever newer replacement model of the new museology (although the point must be made that the new museology was never this either: see Message 2006). It does mean recognizing that museum studies has the potential to engage with and model Stuart Hall’s argument that the conjuncture of any given present is “the outcome of an historical interruption and conceptual reconfiguration in which one field of argument is displaced by another” (discussed in Scott 2005, 5). This potential emerges primarily as a result of the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary “border-work” characteristic of theoretically engaged forms of museum studies work.
Some writers, including During (1993, 97), Hall (1996), Grossberg (2006, 26), and Ang (2006), have identified this approach as a political project which constitutes a form of academic activism. While we agree the process may be instrumentalized in the name of political reform, we would make the point that it is not necessarily the case that political protest must follow on from the process of theorizing change. This point is also made by cultural studies academic (and political activist through the 1980s and 1990s) Kuan-Hsing Chen. Reflecting on the theoretical discourses driving academic work and innovation through this period,3 Chen argued that scholarship at that time was characterized by the attempt to formulate a dialectical approach “to theorize movement and to movementize scholarship” in order to develop a new mode of knowledge through the tension and interaction between the activist and academic work. This same pattern is evident in the development of the new museology through that same period, and in the perceptions that it existed as a theoretical rather than a practical movement. Addressing his experience of the context of Asian cultural studies, Chen reflects:
After a period of fifteen to twenty years, the uncertainty is still with us, but now the problematic appears in a new light. To recast the problem, it appears that, as a result of engaging with the social through organizing and mobilizing work, activists have accumulated a body of knowledge that allows them to understand how society works. And is this not precisely what a well-grounded social analysis (academic or otherwise) is supposed to achieve-However, immersed as they are in daily life struggles, activists do not have enough space and time to reflect on the body of knowledge that they have acquired through practical engagements. Without a sense of urgency, they cannot quite fully articulate their insights into analytical knowledge (which is absolutely central to the advancement of the movement itself ). (Chen 2012, 45–46)
Unlike cultural studies, which has been represented as not having “kept up” with critical rearticulations and relocations and movements in culture in recent years (Grossberg 2006, 18), it is our view that museum studies appears to have responded to the decentralization of culture in a way that has demonstrated the “importance of the conjunctural to what is uniquely Cultural Studies–not letting theory or abstraction or traditions of detached critical distance let one off the hook of understanding the felt specificities of the historical” (Wise 2009, 437). This means that, while cultural studies appears to have ongoing difficulty in its attempts to transgress various dualisms, museum studies may provide a model of practice that is consistent with many of the aims of cultural studies. Further, the collections-based and community-led return to materiality emphasized by the new museology–which Ruth Phillips (2005) calls the “second museum age”–signals a particular realignment with the sociological interests of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies (as the founding cultural studies institution) that sought to “develop practical work that would enable research to be done in the formations of contemporary culture” (Hall 1990, 18; see also Gibson 2007). Indeed, the shifting modus operandi of museum studies appears partly as a corrective to the widespread academic adoption by cultural studies (and collateral fields of study) of Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It was strongly connected to the anthropological turn that characterized the years leading up to the turn of the century, and was responsive to demands by indigenous and source communities for greater agency over cultural patrimony held in museums. These features have continued to attract museum scholars and practitioners interested in museums and collections as sites of encounter, exchange, communication, and transgression.
Both cultural studies and the new museology have been criticized for becoming “too theoretical” and abstracted from the empirical world at hand. However, as already discussed, the intention articulated by many contemporary museum studies researchers to overcome distinctions that exist between different spheres of action (theoretical and professional) and associated debates over instrumentalism versus intrinsic value may make a contribution to cultural studies’ aim to cross disciplinary boundaries–not for the purposes of dissolving those boundaries–but in order to “open new points of connections” and transgress “the boundary line which conventionally separate the humanities from the social sciences” (Bennett 1998b, 566). This is not to say that museum studies is analogous to or subsumable under cultural studies, but that the work done by museum researchers who might make an “accidental” contribution to the wider suite of interdisciplinary cultural studies projects through transgressing disciplinary boundaries should be noted. Moreover, this point lets us revisit the idea that instances of unpredictability, dissonance, and other unlikely exchanges that are central components of Thomas’s museum as method can lead to a range of potential possibilities for cultural understanding.
Following
