museum studies

Our colleagues in Leeds (i.e., the Division of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds and the Thackray Medical Museum) are re-advertising a studentship for a project on nineteenth-century midwifery instruments. The successful candidate will be part of a group working on 19th-century topics connected with museums and material culture. Applicants must be either UK […]

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 […]

We are right now preparing for the next exhibition, Design4Science. It has been on show in Sunderland, Manchester, Cambridge and Stockholm — and will open here at Medical Museion in mid-January 2009. It strikes me that we actually have two in-house names for it. Usually we call it Design4Science, but sometimes some of us speak about it as “Shirley’s exhibition” with reference […]

National Museum of Health and Medicine’s Mike Rhode (‘A Repository for Bottled Monsters’) writes in a comment to Søren’s post the other day that he “feels good about” the fact that our storage problems “amazingly enough, appears worse” than theirs. I’m glad he says “amazingly enough” :-). Thus, medical museums-in-arms we are, struggling to glean nuggets from the bottomless […]

Sorry, there was no posting yesterday. Some of my co-contributors are on vacation, some are busy-busy writing chapters for our forthcoming book, and one is on parental care leave. And I didn’t post because I spent my spare-time yesterday reading a blog that I’ve never heard about before — Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0. I found it because I had a chat with my colleague Bodil […]

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 […]

In an earlier post, I summarized the fascinating autobiographical story behind Harvard biotech professor David Edwards’s new experimental institution, Le Laboratoire in Paris. In his recent book Artscience (Harvard University Press 2008), Edwards tells about his education, how he was swamped with money after a short but succesful career as a biotech inventor, and how he was decent enough to use it for good and visionary […]

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 […]

The third item on my list of ideal-typical reasons why museums want to bring art and science together is that art is a great cross-disciplinary integrator. The argument goes like this: As culturally established factories for the production of meaning in the knowledge society, the humanities have a strong disciplinary function. In other words, our research practices […]

As I wrote in the last post, our co-operation with the Danish Museum of Art and Design in 2004 was the founding rationale for our pilgrimage into art, design and science. Then things went rapidly. In 2006 we engaged Canadian-British artist-curator Martha Fleming to help us organise a workshop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum […]

Which were Medical Museion’s reasons for going into art and aesthetics? The first on my list of ideal-typical rationalities is what I call “once-aesthetically-corrupted, always-corrupted”. The argument goes like this: As Sepp Gumbrecht pointed out in his seminal 2004 book The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, most humanities scholars, including historians, are engaged in […]