Fiona Cameron

Object-oriented democracies: conceptualising museum collections in networks

Abstract Museum collections are increasingly connected to global flows of information via the Internet. These occurrences are radically transforming the interfaces between collections, museums and communities, requiring a rethinking of how collections are conceived as markers of culture, the processes of acquisition and documentation, and the resultant meanings and significances attributed to them. Such transformations invite a more sustained analysis of how organisational structures based on hierarchical forms might operate in flexible networks and information flows. This paper discusses conceptual work undertaken for the Australian Research Council project Reconceptualising Heritage Collections. I will begin by discussing the logic that is currently shaping museums collections and information within global flows. Second, I rethink the metaphors that underpin museum collections interfaces. Third, I clarify and develop new perspectives on the relations and organisation surrounding museum collections and how complexity might be brought back into the documentation process. I then offer some possible solutions on how museums and collections might operate as a complex system in order to thrive and succeed in these flows and spaces. This discussion draws on complexity and network theory to consider all these things.

Climate change, agencies and the museum and science centre sector

Abstract Climate change is a vast, complex phenomena impinging on biological and social life, economics, politics, and culture, stretching disciplines beyond current limits and inviting a new, critical examination of the roles and capacities of museums and science centres in these complex ecologies.1 In this article, I present a section of the research findings from Australian Research Council Linkage grant, ‘Hot Science, Global Citizens: the agency of the museum in climate change’ pertaining to the current and potential roles and agencies of natural history, science museums and science centres in climate change within Australian and US contexts. Through the analysis eight strategic positions and role changes emerge for the different forms of the museum with a greater emphasis on collective action, networking and building more critical information on climate change as a complex issue and governing subject. Within the Australian sample a stronger emphasis was placed on political advocacy and critique.

Saving the ‘disappearing islands’: Climate change governance, Pacific island states and cosmopolitan dispositions

The ‘disappearing islands’ is a distinct idea that emerged out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to describe the vulnerability of small island states in the Pacific to sea-level rise as a result of climate change. In this article I deploy the ‘disappearing islands’ to map the complex politics of climate change governance. Through various governmental rationalities the ‘disappearing islands’ are operationalized as proof of climate catastrophe; as a means of concretizing climate sciences statistical abstractions and as a signifier of the urgency and uneven impacts of global climate change. Drawing on focus group research from the Australian Research Council Linkage project Hot science, global citizens: The agency of the museum sector in climate change interventions, I juxtapose these multifarious governmental perspectives with the views of ordinary citizens in Australia and the United States in relation to the fate of the disappearing islands as a result of developed world consumption choices and carbon-burning practices. I conclude that rhetorical gestures made towards mobilizing a moral and ethical ecological citizenry charged with the responsibility of saving the ‘disappearing islands’ are too simplistic and more difficult to achieve than imagined.

From "dead things" to immutable, combinable mobiles : H.D. Skinner, the Otago Museum and University and the Governance of Maori populations

This paper draws on Callons [2005. “Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence: A Reply to Daniel Millers Critique of The Laws of the Markets.” Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter 6 (2): 3–20] concept of agencement, together with Latours [1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] concept of immutable combinable mobiles to illustrate how Henry Devenish Skinner, ethnologist and anthropology lecturer at the Otago Museum and University sought to form and shape Māori identity, history, culture and populations as subjects of liberal government. It does this through an exploration of Skinners fieldwork and collecting practices. The paper suggests that forms of analysis mediated through the American History School, and the culture area concept were deployed during the emergence of anthropology as a discipline in New Zealand (between 1919 and 1940) to produce ethnographic authority that then acted as a point of connection between scientific networks and the colonial administrative field.

Cosmopolitics, border crossings and the complex museum

Collections documentation systems are powerful frameworks for organising, producing and controlling cultural knowledge. Drawing on the findings from the Australian Research Council Linkage project Reconceptualising Heritage Collections (University of Western Sydney and Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia) and research undertaken using the museum’s Palestinian collections through wikis and focus groups with constituencies in Australia, Israel and Palestine, we illustrate the highly political and fluid nature of the meanings and values existent around objects; and how now, in a networked complex world, non-linear interactions are occurring across transnational borders. These interactions sit uneasily with conventional museum practice. The collections became visible mechanisms to confront the complex relations and politics of borders between the museum and everyday life. ‘Cosmopolitics’, in terms of its political, ethical, cosmological and transnational outlook along with cultural complexity, enables an exploration of the dynamics and the shifting borders of an emerging complex museum. Ideas for the future imaginary of these interactions are further explored through the pathway of chaos theory.