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BOOK SERIES


Museums in Focus


About the Series

Committed to the articulation of big, even risky, ideas in short-format publications, Museums In Focus challenges authors and readers to experiment with, innovate, and press museums and the intellectual frameworks through which we view these. It offers a platform for approaches that radically rethink the relationships between cultural and intellectual dissent and crisis and debates about museums, politics and the broader public sphere.

Museums In Focus is motivated by the intellectual hypothesis that museums are not innately ‘useful’, safe’ or even ‘public’ places, and that recalibrating our thinking about them might benefit from adopting a more radical and oppositional form of logic and approach. Examining this problem requires a level of comfort with (or at least tolerance of) the idea of crisis, dissent, protest and radical thinking, and authors might benefit from considering how cultural and intellectual crisis, regeneration and anxiety have been dealt with in other disciplines and contexts.

Books published in the series are between 30,000 and 50,000 words in length and fully refereed.  If you would like to discuss submitting a proposal, please contact the series editor: [email protected].

Further information about Professor Message's work can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/authors/i14753-kylie-message.

20 Series Titles

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Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation The Keeping Place

Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation: The Keeping Place

1st Edition

Forthcoming

By Robert Hudson, Shannon Woodcock
May 27, 2024

Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation explores Indigenous practices of curation, object repatriation, and cross-cultural community engagement in a dynamic Koori museum. Grounded in the fact that Gunai Kurnai people have never ceded sovereignty, the text reorients dominant...

Mind Museums Former Asylums and the Heritage of Mental Health

Mind Museums: Former Asylums and the Heritage of Mental Health

1st Edition

By Francesca Lanz
March 05, 2024

Mind Museums offers a fresh perspective on the heritage of mental health, bringing museums into sharp focus. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from architecture, museum and exhibition design, and heritage and museum studies, it examines former psychiatric asylums that have been converted into...

Museum Representations of Motherhood and the Maternal Mother Stuff

Museum Representations of Motherhood and the Maternal: Mother Stuff

1st Edition

By Rebecca Louise-Clarke
November 27, 2023

Museum Representations of Motherhood and the Maternal is the first book to address the underrepresentation of motherhood in museums. Questioning how mothering and maternal experiences should be represented in museums, Louise-Clarke argues that such institutions wield the power to influence what we ...

Reflections on Critical Museology Inside and Outside Museums

Reflections on Critical Museology: Inside and Outside Museums

1st Edition

By J. Pedro Lorente
September 25, 2023

Reflections on Critical Museology: Inside and Outside Museums offers a reflective and reflexive re-assessment of museum studies and the first wide-ranging account of critical museology. Drawing on an extensive range of examples from museums and across the museological literature, which are ...

Museums as Assemblage Analysing dynamic museum practice

Museums as Assemblage: Analysing dynamic museum practice

1st Edition

By Jasmin Pfefferkorn
July 31, 2023

Museums as Assemblage offers a new way of thinking about the dynamism of art museums. Using the concept of assemblage, this book unpacks relations between visitors, artists, museum staff, and the museum’s nonhuman components, providing an analytical framework that celebrates the complexity of ...

Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage Experiences of Return in Central Australia

Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage: Experiences of Return in Central Australia

1st Edition

By Jason M. Gibson
June 14, 2023

Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage examines how returned materials - objects, photographs, audio and manuscripts - are being received and reintegrated into the ongoing social and cultural lives of Aboriginal Australians. Combining a critical examination of the making of these collections...

Digital Access and Museums as Platforms

Digital Access and Museums as Platforms

1st Edition

By Caroline Wilson-Barnao
January 09, 2023

Digital Access and Museums as Platforms draws on interviews with museum practitioners, along with a range of case studies from public and private institutions, in order to investigate the tensions and benefits involved in making cultural collections available using digital technologies. Taking a ...

Museums and Atlantic Slavery

Museums and Atlantic Slavery

1st Edition

By Ana Lucia Araujo
January 09, 2023

Museums and Atlantic Slavery explores how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented through words, visual images, artifacts, and audiovisual materials in museums in Europe and the Americas. Divided into four chapters, the book addresses four recurrent themes: wealth ...

Museums as Agents for Social Change Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum

Museums as Agents for Social Change: Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum

1st Edition

By Njabulo Chipangura, Jesmael Mataga
January 09, 2023

Museums as Agents for Social Change is the first comprehensive text to examine museum practice in a decolonised moment, moving beyond known roles of object collection and presentation. Drawing on studies of Mutare museum, a regional museum in Eastern Zimbabwe, this book considers how museums with ...

Museums and Racism

Museums and Racism

1st Edition

By Kylie Message
March 31, 2021

Racism is a hot topic in museums today, as well as an urgent social issue. Focused on the broad field of multicultural policy, Museums and Racism examines how the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia, has responded to political culture and public debate around racism. Analysis focuses on the ...

Queering the Museum

Queering the Museum

1st Edition

By Nikki Sullivan, Craig Middleton
November 14, 2019

Queering the Museum develops a queer analysis of the ways in which museums construct themselves, their core business, and their publics through the, often unconscious, use of inherited ways of knowing and doing. Providing a critique of both the practices and conventions associated with the modern ...

Anti-Museum

Anti-Museum

1st Edition

By Adrian Franklin
November 12, 2019

Anti-Museum charts the development of the anti-museum as a concept and as it has been realised in practice. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the New Museum and PS1 in New York, Mona in Australia, Art42 in Paris and Donald Judd’s Marfa, the book assesses their potential to engage museum...

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