Sunday, June 05, 2011

Book Review: Museum Revolutions

Journal of Folklore Research (Reviewed by Carrie Hertz)


Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed, edited by Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod, and Sheila Watson. 2007. London and New York: Routledge.

Museums—wishing to do good in the world, but like so many public institutions, relying on fickle civic support—must continually justify their own existence by aggressively evaluating the purpose and impact of their endeavors. Grappling with volatile and abiding issues like representation, power relations, identity politics, systems of knowledge, value production, post-colonialism, Eurocentricism, nationalism, and the like, museums in the twenty-first century have a lot on their proverbial plates. In this milieu, then, the constant reflexive desire of museum professionals and scholars to appraise the past, present, and future of museology is both unsurprising and heartening. Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed is just one of a diverse series of edited volumes published by Routledge that valiantly tackles these kinds of issues within museum studies.

2 comments:

AmiraAly said...

That sounds like a really interesting read.
I wonder if it's available in bookstores online though, or even as an ebook through google estores or something.

Andie said...

In the UK it is certainly available on Amazon, both in hard copy and Kindle version, so is presumably available elsewhere