Andrea Witcomb

Understanding the role of affect in producing a critical pedagogy for history museums

Abstract While the existence of uncritical exhibition practices that support nostalgic narratives about the past cannot be denied, this paper is focused on demonstrating both the existence of critical exhibitions and on explaining how they work. In particularly, this paper looks at the ways in which the production of affective, nonrational forms of experience aimed at inducing a heightened level of engagement on the part of visitors is being used to facilitate a more critical reflection on the relationship between past and present. My examples, drawn from curatorial practices in Australia dealing either with contact histories or histories of migration, will be used to explore how explicit forms of engagement with the senses in contemporary exhibition practices gesture toward not only a new understanding of the pedagogical role of museums but also to new forms of pedagogical practice.

Engaging with the future of ‘critical heritage studies’: looking back in order to look forward

This article engages with the Association for Critical Heritage Studies Manifesto which argues that heritage studies is in need of a complete renovation. We do so by looking back to two earlier moments. The first when museum studies also called for a renovation, drawing on those experiences as potentially instructive for the immediate future of heritage studies. The second a debate within cultural studies on the value of engagement with the world outside of academia to achieve the discipline’s political aims. Thus, while agreeing with the questions posed by the Manifesto, we argue that rather than casting the terms of the debate in a way that positions the professional field as needing renovation from without, we might do better by fostering a more ‘organic’ sense of intellectual work, one that values engagement and collaboration rather than critique for its own sake. Our conclusion points to the importance of the teaching of heritage studies as a potential site for such a practice as well as more collaborative models of research practice.

'Hidden from view'? An analysis of the integration of women's history and women's voices into Australia's social history exhibitions

ABSTRACT ‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big picture history to intimate and deeply personal stories that recast our understanding of the past in ways that are inclusive of gendered experiences. We investigate the use of the curatorial voice as reflected in Willis’ work, aligning it with the notion of curatorial activism, before exploring the changing curatorial practices that expanded the potential for an interpretive approach that incorporated the voice of the subjects themselves as a central component in the telling of history. We then analyse the impact of these strategies on traditional understandings of the past through three exhibitions developed by Melbourne Museum over 30 years: The Story of Victoria, a successor exhibition The Melbourne Story, and their Great War centenary exhibition, WWI: Love & Sorrow.

The International Handbooks of Museum Studies

An edited collection of nearly 30 essays by international scholars, curators and designers on the role of media in museums and the relationship between museums and different kinds of media.

Thinking about Others through Museums and Heritage

As one of the first civic, public spaces to represent heritage through the display of collections that were meant to encapsulate at the same time the world and the nation, museums have always been involved in the business of constructing and representing relations between ourselves in relation to others. It is thus not surprising that the emergence of the ‘critical turn’ in the new humanities during the 1980s under the influence of cultural theory — in anthropology, sociology and art history, in history and in archaeology — included museums within its field of critical vision, given the ways in which these, too, were involved in the production of knowledge using the very same disciplinary bases as the ‘old humanities’. Like the old humanities, museums were critiqued for their associations with colonialism, for their hegemonic functions, for their practices of ‘othering’ minority groups, for their maintenance of elite cultural values and for the creation of a canon. As Rhiannon Mason (2011, pp. 74–5) reflects in an essay dealing with the influence of cultural theory on museum studies, ‘[i]t should come as little surprise, then, that the museum — an institution that actively seeks to display multiple cultures and mark out differences — should have become a site of prime interest for those interested in cultural theory’.

Toward a pedagogy of feeling: understanding how museums create a space for cross-cultural encounters

In this chapter I engage with two developments – a growing understanding that citizenship involves political activity on the part of citizens in the public sphere and that affective relationships are an important aspect of this activity – to engage with the increasing use of affective interpretation strategies within exhibitions. I argue that the use of these strategies can be understood as the beginning of a new moment in museological practice that is concerned not so much with finding ways to become more pluralistic in who is represented within museums but with building opportunities for cross-cultural encounters in ways that question established relationships between self and other. I call this new moment “a pedagogy of feeling,” marking it as distinctive from both “a pedagogy of walking,” a term used by Tony Bennett to encapsulate the specific exhibition strategies that supported evolutionary narratives, and “a pedagogy of listening,” which I suggest marks the moment when exhibition practices were concerned with finding ways to increase the number of voices found in museum exhibitions as part of a civic program to encourage greater degrees of tolerance. Central to a pedagogy of feeling is, I argue, the idea of a “terrible gift” (as Roger Simon calls it), which is enacted through an exhibition syntax that uses a wide variety of affective or sensorial interpretation strategies.

Introduction: museum theory, an expanded field

An edited collection of nearly 30 essays by international scholars, curators and designers on the role of media in museums and the relationship between museums and different kinds of media.

The past in the present: towards a politics of care at the national trust of Australia (WA)

Part 1: Place and Identity 1. What role can digital heritage play in the re--imagining of national identities? England and its Icons, Rhiannon Mason and Zelda Baveystock 2. Locating art: the display and construction of place identity in art galleries, Chris Whitehead 3. Place, local distinctiveness and local identity: ecomuseum approaches in Europe and Asia, Gerard Corsane, Peter Davis and Donatella Murtas 4. Representing identities at local municipal museums: cultural forums or identity bunkers? Marta Anico 5. Heritage according to scale, Llorenc Prats Part 2: Remembering and Forgetting 6.Unsettling memories: intervention and controversy over difficult public heritage, Sharon Macdonald 7. Public silences, private voices: memory games in a maritime heritage complex, Elsa Peralta 8. The banalization and the contestation of memory in postcommunist Poland, Barbara Misztal 9. A landscape of memories: layers of meaning in a Dublin park, Kate Moles Part 3: Domination and Contestation 10. Labor and leisure at Monticello: or repr.esenting race instead of class at an inadvertent white identity shrine, Eric Gable 11. The ancient city walls of Great Benin: colonialism, urban heritage and cultural identity in contemporary Nigeria, Flora Kaplan 12. The past in the present: towards a politics of care at the National Trust of Australia -WA, Andrea Witcomb 13. Yoruba identity and western museums: ethnic pride and artistic representations, Anna Catalini