museum and knowledge politics

Emm Barnes has just summarised the ‘Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’ workshop in Manchester, Friday 7 March. Her report focuses on the relation between medical history scholarship and medical curatorship. Read it here. (For an earlier report, see here.)

I think Sniff raised some timely questions in her post last Friday about the upcoming International Conference on the Inclusive Museum (to be held in Leiden in early June)—especially what the meaning of the buzz-word ‘inclusion’ is, and why museums should be ‘inclusive’. The ‘Scope and Concerns’ page of the conference website is an intriguing programme document. As I […]

Formerly announced workshop ’Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’—held Friday 7 March at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) in Manchester—gathered over 40 scholars and curators, mainly from the UK. There were nine presentations in all. One each from Science Museum (London), Museum Boerhaave (Leiden), the Wellcome Collection (London), and the Sedgwick Museum (Cambridge), and another […]

I’ve just received an incoming link from a newly founded medical museum blog called ‘A Repository for Bottled Monsters‘, edited by Mike Rhode, chief archivist of the Otis Historical Archives which is one of collecting divisions of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in the northern suburbs of Washington DC: The title emanates from one of NMHM’s former curator-pathologists who wished to avoid […]

In continuation of our earlier (here and here) discussion about ephemeral biomedical objects, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to the workshop on ‘Scale, Size and the Ephemeral’ at British Museum, next Thursday, 28 February 2008, 1-6pm: The wealth of models, miniatures and dioramas in museum collections provide collecting paradigms modelled on numismatics and library ephemera. At one level these seem to […]

Medical museums do not necessarily need to be in dialogue with contemporary science and technology; they can remain safely embedded in the past. But if they have the ambition—like we do—to contrast possible biomedical futures with the medical past (so as to be able to create some really engaging exhibitions), medical museums are well advised to make some educated guesses […]

Mia Ridge, a database developer for the Museum of London, asks some interesting questions on her blog Open Objects about how museums and cultural heritage institutions relate to the ‘participatory web’ (web 2.0, social networking sites, user-generated content etc). Mia’s (perhaps not very unsurprising) impression from speaking with colleagues is that museums are pretty conservative in this respect. But […]

(In two earlier posts I discussed science communication as a field of governance (here) and the multitude of technoscience (here). Here’s the third post — about the blogging phenomenon and science communication) Blog-savvy readers of this post hardly need to be reminded about the fact that the blog medium has grown explosively over the last ten years and […]

(Here’s the second fragment of my paper on ‘Science Communication, Blogging, and the Multitude of Technoscience’ for the workshop  ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’ at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm last Friday — for the first fragment, see here). As science (qua technoscience) is turning into a truly global phenomenon, science communication too is increasingly turning into […]

Collections are the body and soul, nay the life blood of museums! Accordingly, the Medical & Healthcare Subject Specialist Network in UK organizes a two-day conference and training seminar titled ‘The body and soul of medical collections’ to be held at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, 10-11 March.  The announced aim of the meeting is to inspire museums, libraries and archives to […]