Overview

Analysing Museum Display is the first comprehensive book to bring together approaches to studying museum displays. Drawing on global examples, it reviews different theoretical frameworks and methods, charting major contributions to the field and exploring their potentials and limitations. How and why should we study museum display, and what is its nature as a complex form of representation? The book argues that display is at once material, experiential, and political in producing knowledge and that analysis requires rigorous conceptualisation and careful methodologies. It provides a critical guide to existing concepts and methods, exploring how museum display can be understood using semiotic, narrative, cartographic, and spatial analyses, assemblage theory, new materialist and multisensory approaches, and theories of affect, emotion, and historical positioning. Alongside this, Whitehead presents key orientations for research practice relating to objectivity and subjectivity, historical and contextual awareness, and mixing methods. Analysing Museum Display will be essential reading for scholars and students of museology at all levels. The book will also appeal to museum curators and professionals who are involved in the production of displays and wish to develop a more theorised and reflective perspective on their own practice.

Full Product Details

Author:   Christopher Whitehead (Newcastle University, UK)
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.470kg
ISBN:  

9781138545915

ISBN 10:   1138545910
Pages:   234
Publication Date:   30 September 2024
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

Walkthrough I: First Australians, Canberra, 2019; 1. Introduction: what is display?; Walkthrough II: Atrocity and Trauma, Oslo, 2015; Walkthrough III: A World of Shape and Colour, Corfu Town, 2021; 2. Why Analyze Display?; Walkthrough IV: In the Shadow of Colonialism, Heldenplatz, Vienna, 2023; 3. Script, ritual, performance; Walkthrough V: Your Face, Bratislava, 2023; 4. Text, narrative, exposure; Walkthrough VI: Atmospheres of Deep Time, London, 2022; 5. Affect, assemblage, atmosphere; Walkthrough VII: The Web of Life, Lyon, France, 2022; Walkthrough VIII: Momentous Encounters, Verona, 2023; 6. Map, space, positioning; Walkthrough IX: A Long-gone Display, London, 1878; 7. Orientations for Analytical Practice; 8. References; Index.

Reviews

Author Information

Christopher Whitehead is Professor of Museology at Newcastle University, UK, where he is the current Dean of Global Humanities and Social Sciences, and Honorary Professor of Humanities at the Australian National University. He teaches museum and heritage studies and has trained generations of students in curatorship and exhibition development. He has published extensively on museum history, theory, and practice, and on the politics and experience of heritage and memory. He is series editor of Routledge Critical Heritages of Europe.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions