curation

Apropos our former discussion about blogs and exhibitions — here’s another way of integrating the two genres: In yesterday’s Material World blog, Haidy Geismar, an anthropologist at New York University, relays the experiences of teaching a class in material culture studies together with Robin Nagle, an anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY). Titled “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes […]

Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd — who are currently co-directing a two-year research project on ‘Rethinking Disability Representation’ in the Dept of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester — are soliciting some 20 “original, provocative, timely and scholarly papers” to explore issues surrounding the cultural representation of disabled people and, more particularly, the inclusion (as well as the marked […]

Our collection and display activities are again and again putting the issue of aesthetics on the medical museum agenda. How do we handle the ‘aesthetic dimension’ of medical objects in curatorial practices? I came to think of this question again when I read yet another laudatory review of Sansernes Hospital [Hospital of the Senses] by renowned Danish architect journal editor Kim Dirckinck-Holmfeld and professor […]

Software collecting as part of curating recent science is controversial among museum curators. At the Medical Museion we have started collecting first software items such as epidemiological risk assessment tools. This raises the issue of how to classify and preserve these objects (s. previous post). Just 20 years from now, hardware availability will be critical in order to […]

Thomas and I have written this abstract for the “Sculpture and Touch” symposium to be held at the Courtauld Art Institute, London, 16-17 May next year (see earlier post here). Due to the profound impact of vision on modern Western culture, the history of medicine has mostly been conceived in ocular terms. This is true both […]

Yet another nearly missed conference: the Design Research Group (Anna Moran, Sorcha O’Brien and Ciáran Swan) are organising a one-day conference titled “Love Objects: Engaging Material Culture” on the relationships between people and their objects, to be hosted by the Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 14 February 2008. Dead-line for papers was […]

Sometimes I wish I were still a graduate student, because all interesting conferences these days seem to be aimed at junior scholars (maybe it’s time to shift career again?). For example this one: ‘The Power of Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Morality’, a graduate student symposium at Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Saturday 5 April, 2008. The […]

Joanna Marchant reminds us (on Digital Heritage) that many museums are busy creating on-line catalogues and other digital access points, but that this is a slow process and that few institutions are utilising the full potential of digitalisation. However, she says, a current research project by Suzanne Keene (formerly Head of Collections at Science Museum, now at UCL),  hints that attention should be turned towards mobilising the […]

It’s not directly history of contemporary medicine — but we could nevertheless learn much from the curation project “Från matematikmaskin till IT” (translation probably not necessary 🙂 initiated in 2004 by the Swedish Computer Association (Dataföreningen i Sverige) together with the Department of History of Technology and Science at The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The project focuses on generating new historical source […]