Analysing Museum Display

Theory and Method

Christopher Whitehead (Newcastle University, UK)

$77.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English

Routledge
30 September 2024

Industrial: Commercial Art & Design; Museums & museology; Museum, historic sites, gallery & art guides

Analysing Museum Display is the first comprehensive book to bring together approaches to studying museum display. 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 conceptualization 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 display and wish to develop a more theorised and reflective perspective on their own practice.

By: Christopher Whitehead (Newcastle University UK)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781138545915
ISBN 10: 1138545910
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 30 September 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.