Читать книгу Museum Media - Группа авторов - Страница 17

Research on past museum innovation and practice shows the importance of historical method, and of history as a discipline, within museum studies. This brings us to the wider issue of disciplinarity and methodology. To talk of museum studies as interdisciplinary has become a truism. The volumes here are a clear illustration that those involved in museum studies have been trained in and may have primary institutional locations in a wide range of disciplines and areas of study, including anthropology, archaeology, architecture, area studies, cultural studies, economics, education, geography, literature, management, media studies, political science, and sociology, as well as history and art history. Beyond that, however, they are also carving out new niches, sometimes institutionally recognized, sometimes not, in areas such as digital curation and creative technologies, as well as in art gallery, museum, and heritage studies, in various combinations or alone. Moreover, in addition to disciplines and a multitude of academic specialisms, practitioner contributors bring diverse professional expertise in areas including exhibition design, community engagement, conservation, interpretation, and management.

Alongside the diversity of concepts and methodologies offered by various disciplines and diverse forms of practical expertise, is also the distinctive feature of museum studies – its engagement with the past, present, and future world of museums. Such work, to varying extents, confronts researchers and academics with the actual concerns, predicaments, objects, spaces, media, and people all, in various ways, involved in museum collections and exhibitions. Increasingly, this means actual collaboration, and the development of methodological approaches to enable this. Examples in these volumes include those who consider themselves to be primarily academics, artists, or activists being directly involved in the production of collections, media (e.g., new media apps or forms of display), and exhibitions. The nature of museum work is, inevitably, collaborative, but in some cases it also involves more explicit attempts to work with those who have had little previous engagement in museum worlds and draws on methodology and ethical insight from disciplines such as social and cultural anthropology to do so. Such actual engagement – coupled with what we see as more fluid traffic between academia and museums also powers new forms of theorizing and practice. This productive mobility affords museum studies its characteristic – and, in our view, especially exciting – dynamic.