museum and knowledge politics

In last issue of the journal Isis (vol 107, nr 2, 2016), twelwe scholars discuss different aspects of The History Manifesto from the vantage point of the history of science, technology and medicine.

I just read about a great museum initiative in London — the Museums Showoff. You may have heard about Science Showoff — a forum for all kinds of people working with science communication, who meet and share their work in a performance-based way, “and then chew it over with a pint in hand”. It’s very […]

Steven Lubar — director of the public humanities programme at Brown University and keen observer of things museological — has just drawn his Twitter followers’ attention to a “nice” blog post on the problems of collecting contemporary artefacts written by National Museum of American History curator Carlene Stephens. Stephens’ blog post revolves around Stanley (a driver-less vehicle that won a historic […]

Suddenly, last weekend, the museum blogosphere was surprised by a new museum website, MuseTrain, which has already given rise to lots of ripples on Twitter. Behind the site, with the cryptohumble subtitle “We have some suggestions…”, is a so far anonymous group of people, who have “been working in and around all kinds of museums (art, science […]

Did you ever feel you lacked an overview of how the current European financial crisis affects museums and the culture sector as a whole? I found a list of questions asked by the museum directors, fund-raisers, marketing managers, policy-makers etc. around Europe at the moment: How can cultural heritage be an economic driver? How can […]

There has been quite of a trend of thinking museums in terms of globalisation. For example, critical museum people are discussing the place of their institutions on the global scene (for a very good take on this, see here), and curators have begun to discuss their work in terms of the transnational nature of collections and acquisitioning (see, for example, […]

In the late spring of 2011 we received the bad news that Museum Boerhaave (our history of science sister museum in Leiden) was in the risk zone of loosing its state support if it couldn’t raise enough “extra eigen inkomsten” by the end of the year. But yesterday’s good news is that the museum has now succeeded to raise the extra income and can receive […]

I just received a call for papers to a planned special issue of the journal Science & Education on history of science in museums. That’s a great topic, in principle. But when I began reading the announcement, I had a weird feeling of the kind you can sometimes have when  encountering otherwise familiar phenomena in a foreign setting: Science museums […]

What role can science communication units and sci-tech-med museums play in the emerging biosociety? The forthcoming conference ‘Towards a sustainable bio-based society: aligning scientific and societal agendas for bio-innovation’ in Amsterdam 9-11 May 2012, might provide some food for thought. Organised by the CSG Centre for Society and the Life Sciences, the three-day meeting will bring together academics, policy experts and […]

Let me start with a quote: We need to acknowledge at the outset that museums are in the object acquisition business. New acquisitions are the lifeblood of museums. Like sharks that will die if they stop swimming, museums must collect to stay alive. These were the words of Tufts University art historian Andrew McClellan in […]

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’): COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture […]

My impression of the first and only Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) conference I’ve attended (Malmö in 2008) was quite mixed. The academic quality wasn’t particularly high, there were pretty few theoretically interesting talks, not much surprising stuff, almost no nerds around, no sudden bursts of creativity — and new media were (with […]