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Our organizing idea for this book–that museums are sites of conjuncture where different disciplines, theoretical approaches, and practices meet–means that any attempt to put some order into how we arrange our various contributions will necessarily overlook other ways in which these contributions could be organized in ways that point to other connections between them. The table of contents therefore presents just one way of conceptualizing our book. In choosing this approach, we ordered the chapters in terms of the overarching structure for the book as previously discussed. Part I explores the ways in which museums are use-ful sites for the development of theory precisely because they are sites of conjuncture. It brings together work that attempts to think through what a museum is as well as work that points to the ways in which museums intersect with various cross-currents in contemporary political debate–such as human rights, climate change, and citizenship. Part II is loosely grouped in terms of various disciplinary takes on the museum and contains contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies practitioners as well as museum studies itself. At the same time, we have also sought to continue our coverage of particular thematic issues that have contemporary relevance–this time on postcolonial contexts, nationalism, and the rights of cultural minorities as well as climate change. In the final section we sought to provide a space for museum professionals to reflect on their own practice as a mode of theorizing as well as a space for scholars to think critically about particular practices and museum experiences.

Rather than summarize each of the contributions in relation to this structure at this point, however, we will offer one account of some of the themes and connections that emerge from the experience of actually reading what our contributors wrote–themes which are in themselves responses to specific conjunctures between disciplines and museums, between theory and practice (and the other way round as well), and between disciplines, museums, and particular social, cultural, and political contexts. As we have previously argued, conjunctures are sensitive to temporal contexts and it should thus not be a surprise that there are some recurring themes across the book that cut across our attempts to confine individual contributions to specific disciplines and issues which we considered important in contemporary museological practices and discussion or to divide them into those commentating from outside museums and from within specific discipline formations and those whose starting point is always museums. Indeed, much of the pleasure of editing this book has been the process of discovering those links across the different chapters and the excitement of sensing what marks this particular moment of the encounter between museums and theoretical debates.

When Sharon Macdonald wrote her introduction to this series’ precursor, A Companion to Museum Studies (2006), she argued that the “second wave of museum studies” demonstrated not only its interdisciplinarity and concern with improving the dialogue between theory and practice but also that it had reshaped the earlier concerns with questions of representation and access and the construction of meaning. There was, she argued, much more awareness that meanings were produced in the encounter between visitors and the exhibitions they went to, rather than an exclusive concern with textual readings aimed at revealing the hegemony of particular ideological constructions. For Macdonald, while these interests were not left behind totally, there was a sense in which museum practitioners and scholars were concerned with shifting their discussions away from an almost exclusive concern with the politics of identity toward a more nuanced understanding of museological practices and their effects on society, including a more sympathetic reading of museum work itself, one that was more open to understanding the impact of a range of contexts on those practices.

If the writings we have collected here are any indication, this trend has only intensified. In reading this collection we were struck first of all by the absolute explosion of resources for thinking about museums. These resources come not only from museums themselves, which now, more than ever, resist any attempt to generalize what that they are and what they might mean, so varied is their practice across the globe, but also from disciplines that inform their practice and our critical approaches to them. It is obvious that most people are bower birds in their reading practices, borrowing across disciplines all the time. As a group and as individuals we read in philosophy, anthropology, art history, history, sociology, and political science. We borrow from material culture studies, heritage studies, tourism studies, visual culture studies, film and media studies, memory studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural theory. That most of us read across all of these areas is an indicator not only of the interdisciplinarity of our field but also of the complexity and richness of what museums have to offer as sites through which to think about a whole range of issues.

What then, are some of these issues and themes that cut across our neat schema for thinking about the museum as a site of conjuncture, as a site for the development of theories on the museum, and as a site which is itself generative of theory? What specific themes and concerns has our conjunctural approach revealed as standing out at this particular juncture in time?

Beyond governmentality? Theemergence of thenondiscursive asasite ofinquiry andhow it is being used

Our first two contributions, by Tony Bennett and Kevin Hetherington, open up one of the central conversations that reverberates throughout the book–whether an interest in the governmental function of museums as instruments of civic reform and the production of subjectivity precludes, or is in opposition to, an interest in the role of the figural (Deleuze 1988) or what others call the affective or the nonrational. Bennett’s contribution (Chapter 1), in which we asked him to review his own contribution to the theorization of museums, given that his career has spanned the journey undertaken by the field of the new museology, is a reaffirmation of his central thesis that museums are, at heart, governmental institutions whose role is the regulation of subjectivity through cultural means, operating not only through an exhibitionary complex but also through a network of agents in a constant process of negotiation. He does not see his more recent work, using the writings of Bruno Latour, as disturbing this approach to thinking about museums but as enabling him to also look beyond the practice of exhibition toward that of collecting which, he argues, offers the opportunity to recognize the ways in which museums are one node in a complex assemblage of networks, all of which enact their own agency.

While not disagreeing with Bennett’s claim on the governmental nature of what a museum is, Hetherington’s contribution (Chapter 2) aims to complicate the story through a discussion of the limitations of the ways in which Foucault has been taken up within the new museology by pointing to a period in Foucault’s own writing in which he was concerned with the links between the discursive and the nondiscursive. Hetherington’s aim is to critique the limiting visions of two of the central ways in which Foucauldian thought has been taken up in discussions of the museum–Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s notion of the museum as an institution concerned above all with the production of knowledge and Tony Bennett’s continued affiliation to Foucault’s theories on governmentality. Both, Hetherington argues, are narrow in their understanding of Foucault and miss out on Foucault’s own awareness, in the middle years of his work, of the tension between, as well as the entanglement of, discursive and nondiscursive forms of the production of meaning.

In many ways, Hetherington’s critique is a useful entry into one of the key questions motivating a significant number of our contributors–the need to understand museum experiences as involving nondiscursive modes of knowledge production. Thus we have a number of contributions concerned with identifying and discussing what is variously called emotion, feelings, and affect, which lead us to wonder whether we could identify a third phase of the new museology. If so, we think that the word “feeling” might well encapsulate what it might be about, as opposed to the word “meaning,” which was so important in the second wave described by Macdonald (2006; also see Phillips 2005 on the “second museum age”). While contributions differ in their response to questions including whether or not affect is different from emotion, whether or not its effects connect with reason, and whether or not they contribute to the governmental effects of museums, all of these contributors are concerned with discussing the significance of the nondiscursive for the ways in which we understand the work of museums and the experience of visitors while in them.

Sheila Watson takes up this theme when she posits the need to understand the ways in which emotion is used in history museums (Chapter 14). Aware that the majority of history curators, like their counterparts in history departments in universities, would be averse to the idea that emotions are embedded in the ways in which we write or curate historical narratives, she nevertheless sets out to use insights drawn from the literature on the theory of emotions to think through various uses of emotion in exhibitions dealing with the past. Her point is not only to make the argument that emotions are historically and culturally specific phenomena, but that understanding how they work is necessary to understanding the role museums can play in reinforcing established collective memories and national identities as well as in understanding how to destabilize these.

Elsa Peralta gives us a stunning example of the way in which these emotional experiences can be based on collective material experiences, enabled by a complex network of ideas that have an affective hold on national imaginations (Chapter 15). In contrast to other contributions which emphasize the potential of affect to disrupt received narratives and understandings (Chapters 3 by Sandra Dudley, 4 by Janice Baker, and 16 by Andrea Witcomb), Peralta reminds us that the experience of materiality can in fact be one of the ways in which alternative ways of understanding the past and its relationship to the present are prevented by producing deep affective attachments to particular narratives. In her case study, which concerns the representation of empire in Portugal, what is precluded from attention by the deep collective attachment to a material embodiment of Portugal’s past as the nation of the “Discoveries” is any working through of the legacy of colonialism. Peralta looks in detail at one museum, the Museu do Oriente in Lisbon, to analyze how this particular form of attachment to the past is produced through the presence of objects. The result is a valuable contribution to understanding how affect works in museums and its role in the production of identity narratives.

Witcomb’s contribution to these discussions (Chapter 16) is the suggestion that attention to the nondiscursive on the part of curators and designers, what she calls the exhibition’s poetics, is in fact resulting in the emergence of a new form of museum pedagogy–one she calls a “pedagogy of feeling”–a notion that clearly engages with the idea that emotional experiences play a significant role in what visitors take home from their visit to museums. This is the idea that exhibitions that aim to win the hearts and minds of visitors, in order to enlist them in revisionist agendas and political activism, work by activating a sensorial rather than an informational landscape that promotes the production of empathy for the plight of others and a request to act on that empathy. Like Dudley and Baker (discussed below), Witcomb is interested in the potential that a greater understanding of people’s encounters with objects–including multimedia–might have for destabilizing received ideas but, unlike them, she is interested in the ways these forms of knowledge production can be harnessed for particular pedagogical programs. In responding to the idea of conjuncture, she also situates the emergence of this pedagogical form within a particular historical context and as a strategy for dealing with contested or difficult histories rather than claiming any universality for it.

The possibility, however, that the prevalence of a more sensorially attuned methodology of exhibition is now in play is also explored by Natalia Radywyl, Amelia Barikin, Nikos Papastergiadis, and Scott McQuire in Chapter 20. The piece, itself a masterpiece of interdisciplinary collaboration, argues for a parallel history of display to that of the governmentality approach to thinking about museum spaces as spaces of regulation, arguing–alongside Kavanagh (2000), Witcomb (2003), Henning (2006), and Message (2006)–that museums were also spaces in which visitors could enact both pleasure and divertissement, sensibilities that opened up the role of museums as also involving the imaginary in the production of alternative and political sensibilities. In their chapter, therefore, Radywyl etal. identify and document, through a discussion of the design strategies at the Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, Australia, a sensory environment which they describe as possessing the qualities of an “ambient aesthetic” which makes it possible to tune in to the spatial, visual, and aural contingencies at play in any one exhibition–a process which requires active attention on the part of the visitor and which is embodied in sensorial responses, and which has similarities with the process Witcomb identifies under the notion of a pedagogy of feeling. Like her (see also Witcomb 2010), they are interested in the ways in which contemporary forms of exhibition design enable visitors to produce their own subjectivity and constitute their own narratives through such sensorial responses. As they put it, the constitution of the museum subject has changed and visitors now produce their subjectivity through a range of modalities of “personalized encounters” in con- texts as varied as those of the cultural tourist, the consumer, the producer, and the cosmopolitan citizen (see also Chapter 21 by Philipp Schorch). A hint of the way in which visitors experience these strategies is provided, based on a visitor study undertaken by the group, though that study does not frame the piece as a whole.

Another set of discussions around the role of the nondiscursive in museum exhibitions has quite a different emphasis to the chapters discussed above which, with the exception of Radywyl etal., have a distinct interest in how affect is used in the interpretation of the past for present-day purposes. Instead, this other set of contributions to the role of the nondiscursive is more concerned with understanding the nature of the human–nonhuman encounter and what this might mean for how we understand the nature of people’s experiences in museums. For Sandra Dudley (Chapter 3), for example, attention to the nondiscursive is an opportunity to turn established ways of understanding the relationship between subjects and objects upside down in order to open up the ways in which the material world of objects might impact on our perceptions of the ways things are. Taking her cue from the way in which colonial relations have been reinterpreted so as to recognize the agency of colonized subjects, she argues for the importance of at least imagining the possibility that objects might also have agency on us, even though, in the museum context, it would appear that they are mute and that it is we who give them meaning. The significance of doing so, for her, lies in the notion that objects can potentially shake us from our established ways of viewing things, because of their potential to “fascinate, awe, shock, irritate, or puzzle.” She is interested, therefore, in the ways in which the materiality of objects can potentially provoke unsettlement and open up meaning rather than being used to close down the range of meanings that might be produced by being overladen with interpretation. She wants to leave enough space around them so that they might provoke a reaction in us. Doing so, she argues, would require both innovation in our theoretical approaches to thinking about objects as well as in curatorial practice.

While Dudley approaches her argument as an anthropologist with a specific focus on the study of material culture, Janice Baker (Chapter 4) approaches a similar terrain from a philosophical and art curatorial perspective. Like Dudley, Baker wants to construct an account of affect that gives independent agency to objects, thus opening up a space in which our relations with the nonhuman world of objects can be understood as a site of radical otherness. Thus, she differs substantially from Watson’s arguments in that she does not want to view affect as historically and culturally produced, nor does she want it conflated with emotions which, in her Deleuzian approach to the concept, is already embedded within reason and ideology. Like Dudley, she too works metaphorically but, instead of basing her account of the encounter with otherness in the metaphor of colonialism, she uses the ways in which museums are represented within film as sites of transgression to develop her ideas. Unlike Watson and Witcomb, both of whom are interested in how museums use affect, Baker is more interested in unintended affective encounters and the potential these have for disrupting the ways we see the world.

Another way of thinking about the role of the nondiscursive in museums comes from Russell Staiff, who was asked to contribute a piece theorizing museums from the perspective of tourism studies (Chapter 5). There, as we know from the work of theorists like Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1998) and Coleman and Crang (2002), notions of performance and embodiment have become a strong focus of discussion which, when put together with work on mobilities (Urry 2007), articulates a similar interest in questions about the role of affect in people’s experiences of space and place. Staiff brings this body of work to thinking about museums, using it to displace commonsense notions of museums as places that pre-exist the encounter of visitors (tourists) with them. As in Witcomb’s discussion of the First Peoples exhibition, or Schorch’s description of the way in which his informants’ experiences in the museum changed their relation to the other (see below), meaning is produced as part of a process of encounter and is embodied in experience. For Staiff, these embodied experiences are best explained by what Liz Grosz (2001) calls “excess”–a term she uses to explain the way in which objects are always something more than their physical materiality–but also to point to the ways in which this aspect of their existence cannot be controlled–a point that brings us back to Dudley’s and Baker’s concerns. Museums, as both places and containers for objects, hold the promise of multiple connections waiting to be made, the majority of which cannot be predetermined as they rely on the specific conjunctures brought by those who, in viewing them, bring them to life.

Museums asagents forpromoting reflexive understanding

As a suite of ideas and discussions, these contributions also take our understanding of what museums are and what they can do in two important and related directions. The first is the idea that a visitor’s experience in a museum can be transformational rather than simply reinforcing established ideas. As a proposition this idea challenges the kinds of narratives first proposed in the new museology, all of which understood museums as playing a reinforcing role in the formation of identities–whether those of dominant groups or, under narratives of greater social inclusion, those of minority groups. This does not mean that questions concerning the relationship between display and the formation of subjectivity have disappeared, however, even if our interest in questions of access and representation have become more muted or have changed in their orientation. What is perhaps clearer now is that our questions are no longer simply about who is or is not represented in museums but more about how particular historical processes and experiences, which reverberate into present-day political debates, are dealt with in museums and, as we shall see in Laurajane Smith’s contribution (Chapter 22), are engaged with by visitors. Thus, rather than gender, race, or class, what predominates are questions concerning how we deal with difficult histories such as those of colonialism (Witcomb, Chapter 16; Geismar 10; Butler, 9); slavery (Smith, 22); contemporary issues such as human rights (Barrett, 6) and climate change (Cameron, 17; Dale-Hallett, Carland, and Fraser, 25; and Miller, 8); and whether or not museums should be involved in such attempts to contribute to public debate and, if so, whether they are successful.

In many ways, Shelley Butler’s chapter (9) is an account of the influence of theory, alongside specific historical conjunctures, on our arrival at this point. Asked by us to review the influence of a particular historical moment in the encounter between theory and museum practice–the critical reception of the Out of Africa exhibition–Butler provides us with a history of the attempt to develop a reflexive museological practice that was aimed at transforming people’s attitudes toward the other and, in the process, their own past. What she traces from the Out of Africa moment is the normalization of theoretical perspectives that were once regarded as alienating and confusing, though she argues that reflexive museological practices are more successful when closely aligned with specific movements and forms of activism, such as postcolonialism, urban diversity, and participatory models of democratic citizenship. While we have learned quite a bit from various experiments in reflexive museology about what works and what doesn’t, particularly in terms of the use of irony, what we now need are visitor studies that enable us to understand the extent to which this normalization has an afterlife in the lives of those who experience these exhibitions.

Visitor studies that might demonstrate whether or not such transformations occur, however, are only just emerging. As Smith (Chapter 22) puts it, we need to have far more understanding of visitors’ critical acuity than we currently do, a problem that she locates in our tendency to frame visitor studies with a concern with finding out what visitors learn rather than asking what meanings they create during their visit to the museum. For Smith, most visitors come to museums to “feel”–a desire that may express itself in a process of self-transformation or, more likely, in a process where they reinforce the feelings and beliefs they already have. Learning something new is, in most cases, not top of the list. In this context, the discussions by Witcomb on the emergence of a pedagogy of feeling and the emergence of an ambient aesthetics discussed by Radywyl, Barikin, Papastergiadis, and McQuire in Chapter 20 should also be kept in mind.

In this book we have two examples of possible methodologies and theoreticalapproaches for capturing what visitors feel–Philipp Schorch’s study and that of Laurajane Smith herself (Chapters 21 and 22 respectively). Both start from the premise, as do all of the contributions discussed so far, that any meanings produced in a museum are part of a process that occurs in the moment, that is embodied, and that is produced out of an encounter. Nothing is predetermined. Both pieces also point to the need to engage with the emotional aspects of this encounter and both argue that the result is an expression of a sense of self in relation to others. They differ, however, in their readings of the potential of museums to provide spaces that enable visitors to have transformative experiences in which their established sense of self in relation to others is questioned.

Schorch, who uses a narrative-hermeneutic approach and interviews only a few people at one museum but in much greater depth than Smith, and over a length of time, is interested not only in what meanings people produce out of their visit to museums but in how these meanings are produced through their encounter with the museum. In his reading of his informants’ accounts, people use museums to challenge themselves and question their values and belief systems. His findings need to be contextualized by the fact that he only interviewed “tourists,” and therefore those who were traveling to have experiences they could not have at home and were perhaps in a state where they were more prepared to have their value systems challenged. Nevertheless, the openness of Schorch’s methodology, and his insistence that we must allow visitors to narrate their experiences in museums by providing them with enough time to do so and to reflect on it them selves, is instructive. In contrast, Smith’s methodology uses a more conventional survey approach, which, while capturing very great numbers of people, still man aged to remain open in its orientation, seeking to allow interviewees to create their own meanings. Her findings point to the fact that a significant number of people actively put up barriers to stop themselves from having their value systems challenged, though not all do so. It would appear, then, that some combination of the methodologies employed by our two contributors might offer us an insight into why some people respond well to challenges and others do not, as well as into what strategies on the part of museums may or may not encourage such responses.

Museums andthepublic sphere: Regulation, human rights, andactive citizenship

The concern with whether or not museums are spaces of alterity brings us to another central theme in this book–the contribution of museums to the public sphere and their place within it. One line of argument continues to be that represented by the governmentality school of thought in which museums are cultural institutions whose function is the regulation of citizens (Bennett, Chapter 1). The idea of regulation however, does not exhaust the possibilities here, as contributions by Barrett (Chapter 6), Cameron (17), Dahlgren and Hermes (7), and Miller (8) among others all indicate (see also Witcomb, 16, and Radywyl etal., 20, who argue for the need to include affective encounters alongside an understanding of museums as spaces of governmentality in response to the formation of new forms of subjectivity).

Fiona Cameron’s contribution (Chapter 17), heavily influenced by Bennett’s arguments concerning both governmentality and its applicability to a Latourian understanding of networks and assemblages, is a case in point. Cameron argues first of all for recognition that museums are increasingly embedded in a range of networks and assemblages that require them to understand the kinds of relations between the human and the nonhuman world. Her particular application of this argument concerns the ways in which museums need to change how they represent and understand climate change if they are to help people engage with the complexity of what is happening. She goes on to argue that, to do so, museums need to understand climate change from the point of view of the new nature–cultures paradigm–a paradigm that refuses to accept traditional binary oppositions including that between humans and nonhumans. This is a perspective that takes us back into the material and sensorial turn articulated by Dudley and Baker above. Cameron uses her understanding of the nondiscursive to make an argument for the wholesale need for museums to engage in a program of institutional reform so that they may continue their project of remaining relevant to contemporary social needs–which she understands as the ability to respond to an issues-based museological program, mentioning climate change, genetically modified goods, racism, and violence as some of these issues. For her this indicates that museums need to become “liquid” institutions, by which she means they need to become less hierarchical, less positivist, in their epistemology and therefore more able to deal with uncertainty and complexity. This can only be done, she argues, if museums take on the new epistemologies being developed under the rubric of the new nature cultures–a rubric that argues for the significance of material and embodied experiences of the world. Her piece is thus at once a critique of the epistemologies that have underpinned museums’ engagement with scientific knowledge so far, and a call for a new epistemology to guide the institution of the museum into the future so that it can help its audience deal with complexity and uncertainty.

As many of the contributions in this book attest, one of the main ways in which museums understand their public role is the increasing practice of representing and collaborating with culturally and ethnically diverse groups. Practices that support this discourse, argues Jennifer Barrett (Chapter 6), are part of a long history in which museums have contributed to an international public sphere through a universalist philosophy, though they currently take two very different forms–one supported by the Federation of International Human Rights Museums based on a human rights discourse, the other by the so-called universal museums, based on the idea of universalism. Barrett’s chapter is a close analysis of the two competing discourses/practices which teases out the tensions between them as well as their intellectual history.

Political science and cultural studies give us another perspective on the role of museums in the public sphere, one in which theorizing about the changing nature of citizenship offers a new way to think about the ways in which museums enact Theory their “publicity” (being the qualities, characteristics, and obligations they promote in their capacity as places in the public sphere and imagination). As Peter Dahlgren and Joke Hermes’s chapter (7) argues, theories of citizenship open up two alternative ways of thinking about how museums contribute to the process of the formation of citizens. The first concerns the ways in which civic cultures provide pathways for the enactment of citizenship, while the second looks at the ways in which a cultural citizenship perspective opens up an understanding of how culture “offers the possibility to build and reflect on social cohesion.” Their focus is to bring these two perspectives together to identify the different means by which museums can provide spaces for socially inclusive forms of civic participation so as to support strong democracies. Of interest, once again, is their argument that such inclusive practices need to engage both reason and affect or else their idea of subjectivity will be the poorer and their impact lessened.

Toby Miller’s provocation (Chapter 8) provides another way of looking at the relationship between the public role of museums and contemporary political debates, such as those around climate change, while also linking these discus sions to the idea of active citizenship. Like McGuigan, Miller is scathing of those who choose to privilege economic gain over any sense of public responsi bility. In Miller’s case, we have a brilliant critique of the ways in which sponsor ship deals and corporate rhetoric on innovation are preventing more informed, and indeed critical, perspectives on modern technological developments that are positively harmful in terms of the fight against carbon-emitting devices.Rather than leading us into a blind consumerism devoid of any critical insight, Miller argues, museums should be equipping us to become active citizens capa ble of making well-informed choices. But Miller also offers a deeper critique of the present drive to celebrate innovation, suggesting that, unless they adopt the precautionary principle in which the onus is on the drivers of innovation to prove their innovations are not harmful to the environment, museums should not be claiming that they are green institutions. Perhaps ironically, museums, Miller argues, actually need to be reminded that, rather than blindly supporting corporate discourses on innovation, they would do better to traffic on what they have always done well–the production of narratives of continuity and the need for preservation. For Miller, the ability to contribute to public discourse in ways that are ethically responsible as well as critically reflexive is based not on notions of change and innovation but on those of a more guarded response to such changes. Thus the natural conservatism of museums is perhaps something that should not be automatically thrown out, as that may also involve throwing out the ability to maintain a critical distance. Miller makes it quite clear that we need museums both to respond in the moment to the moment but also to think more critically about their involvement in the links between political, eco nomic, and cultural forms of citizenship by pursuing a greener form of politics in terms of both their institutional practices and their politics of representation.

Reflexivity, museum practice, andtheory building

The notion that museums are, or at least ought to be, spaces for critical reflection is also central to a growing number of professionals, who, as James Gardner points out, have to deal with this not only at the level of ideas but at the level of practice and in a context in which community expectations might be otherwise. This is nowhere more evident than when museums are asked to provide a memorializing function in response to deep collective traumas occasioned by tragedies. Thus the chapters by James Gardner on the Smithsonian’s response to the 9/11 attacks, and that of Liza Dale-Hallett and her colleagues on Museum Victoria’s response to the Black Saturday bushfires that killed well over a hundred people and destroyed many communities, offer not only a useful documentation of museum methods for collecting and displaying material that speaks to the emotional landscape produced by these events–a documentation that helps to anchor the earlier discussions on emotion and affect–but also offer their own theorizations of what they understood themselves to be doing.

For Gardner (Chapter 24), the central problem posed by the need for museums to respond to pressures to commemorate and memorialize events such as September 11 concerns a theme that has already come up–whether the role of museums is to reinforce established identities or to provide a space for critical reflection. In his view, emphasizing individual and collective memories, while responsive to immediate needs and more populist in its orientation, runs the danger of not fulfilling the museum’s public function of providing professional histories that retain a critical framework and help to contextualize difficult histories. Responding to the event of September 11, therefore, required the Smithsonian to think through how to respond to the immediate need to memorialize and document people’s memories and emotions while also building the base for a collection that could also engage with the moment as a historical moment that also needed interpretation and mediation. That the museum has not been able to do the latter, either in exhibition form or through a comprehensive collecting policy at the time of writing, is, for Gardner, deeply troubling. Gardner’s chapter is thus a careful intervention in American public history debates in which there is a strong argument that calls for museums to become more democratic by engaging with people’s memories rather than fashioning critical perspectives on history. At stake are not only notions of professionalism and its role in the public sphere but also questions about the extent to which museums should shape public consciousness or merely reflect existing cultural formations.

In many ways, Liza Dale-Hallett, Rebecca Carland, and Peg Fraser’s chapter (25) shares Gardner’s concerns, arguing that Museum Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia, too was faced with the need to provide a mourning house for those directly affected by the disastrous bushfires but recognized that this need also presented an opportunity to document the event in ways that would challenge people’s understandings of the Australian environment, of climate change, and of its impact on how we should live in the place. What is different is that, in the Australian case, ways were found to insert a critical voice alongside the memorializing voice, no doubt because in Museum Victoria’s case it was dealing with a natural rather than a political disaster and because there is extensive debate about the implications of climate change on our attitudes to nature and our lifestyles. Despite the difficulties faced by the National Museum of American History, however, both pieces are a reaffirmation of the belief that museums can and ought to claim a critical role in contemporary public debates, that their collections are a resource for the development of reflexive forms of knowledge production, and that they should do all this while also finding ways to address people’s needs for a place that deals with the ineffable–in this case with trauma. That finding ways to achieve these aims involved rethinking museum methods around collection, documentation, and display only goes to show that questions concerning museum practices and methods are inherently related to our concepts of what museums are, could, and should be and that thinking through these questions requires both analytical and conceptual toolkits. They are therefore deeply theoretical as well as practical endeavors.

Methods, agency, andtheproduction ofknowledge

Interactions between methods and agency, and the knowledge production that can subsequently develop out of this process can become clearer if we take Nicholas Thomas’s suggestion that we need to be more open to thinking about museum methods as a form of theorizing. Another suite of essays gathered across the different sections of our book demonstrates quite clearly how specific museum practices reflect particular theoretical positions, disciplinary formations, and approaches to the world, revealing in the process something about the nature of museums as cultural institutions. The first of these is Ien Ang’s contribution, in which she questions the very possibility of radical institutional change in art museums. A cultural studies academic, Ang positions much of her work along the lines of the engaged academic who does not want to position themselves on one side of a theory/practice divide (see Ang 2006). In her contribution to this volume (Chapter 11), however, Ang discusses the difficulties of holding on to such a position when faced with the institutional conservatism of the art museum. Her chapter is a reflection on her experiences during a research project that followed an attempt by both the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art (both in Sydney, Australia) to extend their reach into communities that do not normally attend art museums or engage with art. Ang found that, despite the recognition on the part of these museums of the kinds of criticism that have been leveled at their kind, they were unable to let go of one central premise–that they, and only they, had the right and the expertise to define what art is. This position, she argues, made it impossible for these museums to live up to their aims to democratize both themselves and access to art, making them unable to truly collaborate with the communities with which they were trying to engage. For Ang, this means that the institutional function of the art museum remains one of proselytization, of carefully guarding not only who gets to define what art is but also what artworks constitute art, just as Bourdieu and others have argued.

One has to go outside the public museum to find other players in the discursive production of what constitutes art, but, as Jim McGuigan’s chapter (12) on the activities of the Saatchi Gallery makes clear, this is not without its problems either. While not cloaking their activities under a democratic discourse, the Saatchi Gallery represents, for McGuigan, a new conjuncture in which neoliberal forms of capitalism have the power to create new categories of art by their collecting activities and, in the process, erase any of its critical potential. Any vision of the public function of art–as a site of critical discourse, as a healer, or as an instrument of cross-cultural communication–is lost, even if, as Ang’s study demonstrates, such claims tend toward the utopian.

The ways in which museums produce an understanding of what Art is through their curatorial and interpretation strategies is also central to Haidy Geismar’s chapter (10). Geismar is concerned with teasing out the two-way relationship between contemporary art and museums of anthropology, analyzing the ways in which museum methods, once again, constitute not only the object but also the disciplinary frameworks that inform their display and interpretation. Her contribution thus moves between a focus on the aestheticization of anthropology museums and the interventions of contemporary artists in anthropology museums. Like Ang, her target is the way in which we come to understand Art through museological practices, in this case, that of the anthropology museum.

Theorizing and critiquing particular museum methods is also the focus of Fredrik Svanberg’s contribution (Chapter 19), which focuses on collecting practices. Once again, we find that the turn to materiality drives this analysis as well. In his case we find an argument that turns around conventional approaches to thinking about the role of collecting in museums, from one that represents the world to one that actively shapes how the world is perceived and, in the process, regulates that world. As he puts it, “collecting is first and foremost about the management of the world outside the collection that collecting achieves through the management of heritage objects.” Turning positivism on its head, Svanberg uses the concept of assemblages as possessing agency to argue that collections also have agency, shaping not only the world outside museums but their own internal system as well. Recognizing this is, he argues, the first step to achieving institutional change and ensuring that museums develop a more polysemic practice that does not divide the world so sharply into us and them–a hope that he argues could be achieved by thinking through the possibilities afforded by the digitization of collections and their records.

Svanberg’s focus on the concept of agency is only one instance of this theme. As we have already seen, agency is a driving theme in discussions about objects as well as visitors. In terms of understanding the function of museums as public institutions, however, there are a further two discussions that we could bring together under this theme. The first is Kylie Message’s arguments concerning the significance of curatorial agency in shaping the agenda of contemporary museums. The second is the agency of source communities discussed by Howard Morphy.

In a context that often conflates an understanding of museums as governmental institutions with the idea that they answer to the needs of the state, it is often too easy to have a simplistic instrumentalist view of museums and the conditions under which their staff operate. As Message shows (Chapter 13), there is in fact a considerable space for curators to exercise agency and determine institutional paths. The relationship between agency and the role of museums in the public sphere as a consequence of specific museum methods, however, also becomes an opportunity for Message to speak back to theory, in one example of how museums “can be good to think with” (Bennett, Chapter 1). In this case, she uses an example of curatorial agency at the National Museum of American History in collecting the material culture of the civil rights movement in the United States during its formative period to argue that museums can make a contribution to social activism theory. This is because they offer, she argues, a methodology for engaging with activists, one based on participant observation and direct involvement, which is able to account for cultural factors in the rise of protest movements, thereby making a significant potential contribution to social activism theory. The chapter simultaneously analyzes the contribution made by museum practitioners to the public sphere and the need to understand the ways in which affect, emotion, and memory are integral to understanding not only social relations but the ways in which these might be embodied in representations of those relations, such as exhibitions.

Howard Morphy’s chapter (18) is concerned with thinking through how a closer analysis of museum methods might be useful in theorizing disciplines–in this case that of museum anthropology. Morphy’s interest is in how such a closer analysis can reveal a more complex understanding of the ways in which museums operate as contact zones in colonial contexts. He is particularly concerned with challenging the dominant framework in which indigenous peoples are not regarded as having had much agency in their relations with colonial collectors. As he puts it, while one of the remarkable shifts, particularly in settler societies such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, is the remarkable flowering of positive relations between museums and sources communities, we tend to overemphasize past practices as leaving no room for agency on the part of indigenous communities at all. In his chapter, Morphy demonstrates that, even at the height of colonialist practices, there were those who sought a closer relationship and recognized indigenous agency. Recognizing and accepting this history, Morphy argues, is an essential step toward opening up the ethnology museum to present-day indigenous communities who would otherwise assume that these institutions are closed to them.⁴ It is also an essential step in recognizing the contribution of museum anthropology to anthropology itself–namely the practice of fieldwork and the idea of a well-documented collection–an aim that required collaboration with source communities. He advances his arguments through a historical approach–the engagement of the Yolngu People in northeast Arnhem Land, Australia, with collectors in the 1920s and 1930s.

There is one final contribution that shows us the contribution of museum methods to another discipline–that of art practice and its theorization. In a chapter (23) organized as a conversation between two artists, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, and a theorist, museologist, curator, and art historian, Amelia Barikin, we get an insight into how particular art curatorial practices are taken as the starting point for an artistic practice that aims to provide a space for the enactment of memory. The specific method in question is that of the atlas, which is taken as a metaphor for one way of producing a memory effect that is common to both museum and artistic practice. What emerges is a revealing analysis of the ways in which particular forms of art practice converge with the memory effects of memorializing museums. Only in this case, what the artists wanted to achieve was a form of memory practice that interrupted the present in order to get away from a celebratory and rhetorically empty form of commemoration–an aim they achieved by avoiding action shots and photographing instead a landscape empty of people, evoking a sense of the interminable waiting that is also part of war and points not only to its desolation but also the global infrastructure behind it–the military base in the desert, the helicopter approaching. When laid out like an atlas, or an archive, the images jostle with each other for attention, working as a “counter-museum” and resisting narrative fixity.

There is undoubtedly much more that could be said about the contributions of our authors, either individually or across groups of them, as well as many more narratives that could be teased out as themes. It should, however, be clear from the above attempt to instill some degree of order and pull out what appears to us a particularly interesting conjunctural moment in which tendencies first identified in the second wave of museum studies are now in full flower. The field of museums provides an expanded field of vision for those of us interested in following particular theoretical debates, but it does so precisely because this field is constituted through a series of methodological practices that have and continue to be key to the ways in which disciplines are shaped, public space is understood and produced, subjectivities are shaped, and relations between peoples are enabled. If there was ever any doubt as to the contributions of museums to the formation of culture or their relevance to innovation in both theory and disciplinary practices, we hope our collection goes a long way to demonstrating the value of thinking otherwise.