museum studies

Here’s my talk at the night of discussion titled ‘What the hell is the point of museums?’ held at Medical Museion November 3, 2016

Many of the objects held by museums of science and medicine are significant because they have been used in the production of knowledge and scientific enquiry. This blog post discusses how we might display such objects in ways that draw on their potential to generate scientific knowledge as well as their cultural history and materiality. […]

In the recent issue of Curator there is an interesting and empirically well-founded paper on visitor experience of exhibitions, entitled IPOP: A Theory of Experience Preference. It lays out a typology called IPOP of what draws people to exhibitions – Ideas, People, Objects and Physical. The authors claim that an individual’s relative attraction to the […]

This post was originally published on the official blog of the International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, held in Manchester 22-28 July, as an appetiser for the paper “Understanding social media in STEM museums: the lessons from establishing a bio-hacking laboratory” that I co-authored with Karin Tybjerg and which Karin presented in the […]

A few months ago, I gave a small talk at an internal seminar here at Museion where I presented some thoughts about how to further our engagement with objects and how to take materiality more seriously. Here is the talk: Not just a museum with things, but a museum about thingness – possible strategies for […]

I’m participating with a paper titled “The material life-course of a scientist” at workshop ‘The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies’ to be held at Science Museum, London, on 18 July. There are many things I would like to take issue with in this call for papers: Isn’t the notion of ‘return’ of […]

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 […]

Until recently I thought the use of mannequins in museums was an almost extinct species of exhibition design. We removed the last mannequins from Medical Museion’s public exhibitions more than a decade ago and have only kept two of them in the staff area for the fun of scaring the shit out of new employees […]

On next Thursday, 15 November, museum and material culture scholar Sandra Dudley will speak about “The possibilities of things: an object-centred view and its implications for museums” at Medical Museion’s MUSE-seminar (abstract below). Sandra Dudley has a background in anthropology, she has been, among other places, at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Smithsonian in Washington DC, before coming […]

Just learned from a job ad on the UKMCG-list that the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds is launching a new research and curatorial project titled “Putting the Magic Back into Medicine”. The project, which is funded by Arts Council England, is meant to lay the foundations for transforming the Thackray Museum’s identity by, as they put […]

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 […]

The trickster is clever and mischievous, crafty and artful, charming and entertaining. He or she lives outside established hierarchies, crosses boundaries and brings objects from one realm to the other. This character sprang to mind as we were discussing the identity of Medical Museion. What should the role be for museums in general and how […]