museum and knowledge politics

I haven’t had a chance to see the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow yet. But Øystein Horgmo (The Sterile Eye) has just written an enthusiastic comment on their permanent exhibition, ‘A Healing Passion‘, which is based on William Hunter‘s big anatomical and pathological collections. Like myself, Øystein has no patience for long texts in museums: This exhibition however, is visual all the way […]

During the medical garbage collecting day in late May, we brought in a number of wonderful and interesting medical artefacts to our collections, including this plastic mannequin from the Department of Odontology (it’s Camilla to the left). Now Vanessa tells us that Steve Erenburg (a.k.a. radio-guy), a New York based artefact dealer, has this dental mannequin called Dentman — an aluminum head sitting on a cast […]

Kostas Arvanitis at the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester, draws attention to the proliferation of museum blogs at the Manchester Museum. More and more members of staff are creating blogs “to reflect upon their own work, offer a glimpse of what happens ‘behind the scenes’ and invite people to voice their views about all these”. […]

Just a few words about the upcoming conference ‘The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship’ at Deutsches Museum in Munich, 27-28 November 2008 — a follow-up on the conference Research and Museums that was held in Stockholm in May last year. It will be an interesting conference because — by bringing together exhibition makers, museum experts, designers, artists, cultural […]

Last month I got the opportunity to visit the recognized Monterey Bay Aquarium on the West Coast of California. My family (husband, two kids, 7 and 10 and my niece, 17) spent an entire day learning and enjoying about the animal life in the sea. The variety of displays and activities were overwhelming, the size […]

Relations between curators and museum management, between museums and their owners, and between museums and sponsors/donors come in all varieties. Sometimes they can be quite troubled—one of the best known cases is perhaps the censored Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in the 1990s. The Smithsonian apparently has a perennial problem. In an article […]

The registration is now open for the ‘University museums and community’ conference in Manchester, 16-20 September. The meeting is organised by ICOM’s International Committee on University Museums and Collections (UMAC) and the registration fee is reasonable low. So this is a good opportunity to meet others engaged in university museums. This year’s topic is important because our kind of museums have to find […]

How to handle human remains is a key issue for us and for other (medical) museums (see earlier post here, here, here and here). Last February, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris organised a series of round-table discussions about the ethics of collecting and displaying human remains. Now the full text of the discussions have been […]

For a decade, University Museums in Scotland (UMIS) have organized biennial conferences dealing with themes like cultural entitlement and museums (2006), the significance of collections (2004), the alleged ‘death of museums’ (2000), etc. (see all programmes here). This year’s conference in Aberdeen (20-21 November 2008) will focus on ‘The Contentious Museum’ because, say the organisers, “museums have become increasingly contentious places”. I couldn’t agree more. Museums are situated […]

Continuing the thread of thought in our art-science session at the SLSA meeting in Berlin in early June, I’ve just read David Edwards’s Artscience: creativity in the post-Google generation (Harvard University Press, 2008). In Chapter 3 (“Idea translations in cultural institutions”), Edwards gives an interesting argument for bringing art into science and medical museums through the […]

At last, here’s my final post in the series of rationalities for bringing art and science together in science, technology and medical museums. This one also has to do with the issue of identity formation (see last post), but now among museum curators. Here’s the argument: In the eyes of the general adult public, STM-museums are usually […]

In five earlier posts I have discussed why science, technology and medical museums are increasingly employing art in their exhibitions. The fourth reason in my list of ideal-typical rationalities for bringing art and science together goes like this: If you believe in what some sociologists have recently called ‘biocitizenship’, i.e., the biomedical version of what European bureaucrats […]