Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums
Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums engages the highly problematic and increasingly important issue of museums, science centres, their roles in contemporary societies, their engagement with “hot” topics and their part in wider conversations in a networked public culture. Hot topics such as homosexuality, sexual, and racial violence, massacres, drugs, terrorism, GMO foods, H1M1 (swine flu) and climate change are now all part of museological culture. The authors in this collection situate cultural institutions in an increasingly interconnected, complex, globalising and uncertain world and engage the why and how institutions might form part of, activate conversations and action through discussions that theorise institutions in new ways to the very practical means in which institutions might engage their constituencies.
Dr Fiona Cameron is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia. Fiona theorises, researches and writes about museums in contemporary societies; the agency of the museum sector in public culture, citizen engagement with controversial topics, digital media and heritage collections in global flows.
Dr Lynda Kelly is the Head of Audience Research at the Australian Museum, Sydney. She has published widely in museum evaluation and the impact of social media/Web 2.0 on contemporary museum practice. She administers Museum 3.0, a social networking group for museum professionals and in 2007 completed her PhD researching museum visitors’ learning identities.
“This important book, about museums incorporating difficult and contested subjects into their work...helps merge isolated examples onto a more coherent and acceptable practice. The authors wish to propose change because they believe in a different definition of museums.”
- Elaine Heumann Gurian (consultant and member of Museum group)
“This is a wonderfully assembled, fascinating and significant collection of examples which I hope will augment the confidence of CEOs and boards to break through their widespread inertia.”
- Emlyn Koster Ph.D (CEO, Liberty Science Center, Jersey City, USA)
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