museum studies

How to display artefacts that cannot be touched or sometimes even seen, is an issue that has cropped up frequently in museums, particularly in medical museums wanting to exhibit molecular, chemical and genomic items. Thinking about this was part of the inspiration for the Sensuous Object Workshop in September here at Medical Museion. So it was […]

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 […]

“While much has been written on the history of psychiatry, remarkably little has been written about psychiatric collections or curating”, says the back-cover of Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry Through Collection and Display, edited by Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon. A first sketch to a comparative history of collections of psychiatric objects, the volume, which will be published […]

In small ethnically homogenous countries like Denmark, Poland and Finland, there is a thick aura of nationalism around museums. For that reason alone, the planned conference on ‘Transnational History of Museums’, 17-18 February 2012 seems like a relief. Organised by the Institut für Kunstwissenschaft und Historische Urbanistik at TU-Berlin, the aim of the conference is to go […]

A couple of years ago, Camilla Mordhorst and I were playing with the idea that the museum was like a blog. What would Medical Museion be like of it was modelled on Biomedicine on Display? I thought about our discussions when I read Mia Ridge’s report from the recent Digital Communication and Heritage meeting at Nordiska Museet in […]

Hot on the heels of Museum Materialities comes another new anthology on museums studies, objects and materiality. It is entitled The Thing About Museums – Objects and Experience, Representations and Contestations and is available for pre-order on Amazon with a publishing date in September. The table of contents looks very promising and can be seen […]

These are some of the reasons to love museums found on twitter yesterday: Museums help you ask new questions. You get a little knowledge and crave more. Because they make me feel excited, like a child. They open up the world and expose the tiny little bubble we all live in. Museums are for EVERYONE. They […]

In the process of selecting objects for a new exhibition, I (re)discovered this room: It is located beneath the roof of the museum, and contains, as the picture shows, literally hundreds of small glass vials with various chemical labels. Most are empty, but a few still has the original contents. Aside from being a treasure […]

Shall museum exhibitions exude labour or grace? That is, shall they reveal the hard work gone into producing them? Or shall they appear effortless and graceful, concealing the many hours of curatorial work? Just a decade ago, museums tried to hide the curators’ efforts; what mattered was the final product as the audience saw the show. […]

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize! Just over 15 years ago, […]