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SCOPE AND CONCERNS | EDITORS AND ADVISORY BOARD | ASSOCIATE EDITORS | JOURNAL PROFILE | CONTACT

ISSN 1835-2014

Scope and Concerns

At this time of fundamental social change, what is the role of the museum, both as a creature of that change, and perhaps also as an agent of change? The International Conference on the Inclusive Museum and The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum are places where museum practioners, researchers, thinkers and teachers can engage in discussion on the historic character and future shape of the museum. The key question of the Conference and the Journal: How can the institution of the museum become more inclusive? Several dynamics emerge in our contemporary context, each of which may portend a more inclusive museum:

Visitors

No longer the universal individual citizen of our recent modern aspirations, visitors of today are recognisably diverse. The dimensions of this diversity are material (class, locale), corporeal (age, race, sex and sexuality, and physical and mental characteristics) and symbolic (culture, language, gender, family, affinity and persona). These are the gross demographics, the things that insist on our attention. But if we take the time to look more closely at today’s public, it is qualified by intersections and layers of identity which immediately turn the gross demographics into dangerous oversimplifications. The paradox of today’s public is that, in an era of globalisation, real cultures are diverging: dispositions, sensibilities, values stances, interests, orientations, affinites and networks.

So how can one speak to audiences? How does participation work? How can we create meanings which are germane?

‘Inclusivity’ names part of the answer, a paradoxically two sided answer. One side is to recognise particularity. Who and what should be in the museum? What is it to be comprehensive? What is canonical and definitive? To answer these questions today, we need to move beyond the divisions of high as opposed to popular culture, the techno-scientific as opposed to the everyday, the national-modern as opposed to the ethnographic-traditional. No longer can we solve the problem of difference, of ‘us’ and ‘them’, by putting them in separate categories and spaces unto themselves. We need to anticipate the particularties of visitors.

The other side of this answer is not just to catalogue of differences, to check them off from a list of potential points of dissonance. It is to create new form of universality, the universality of inclusivity. How do we create a musuem where the text is open, where every visitor is allowed the space to create their own meanings, where no visitor is left out? The answer in part is in to devise new ...

Forms of Engagement

What is the role today of the reader, the viewer, the audience, the employee, the citizen, the customer, the patron?

Our recent modernity was premised on relatively passive readers, viewers and audiences; relatively compliant employees and dependent citizens; and relatively appreciative customers and patrons. To take just a few touchstones of change, the new media turn readers, viewers and audiences into users, players and characters. Workers are supposed to personify the enterprise and citizens to take responsiblity for themselves. And customers are always right—and for their differences, products and services have to be customised—and the quirks of patrons always patronised.

The change represents an evening up of balance of agency and a blurring of roles, between producers and consumers of knowledge, between creators and readers of culture, and between the person in command and the person consenting.

In museums, more than simply ‘interaction’, visitors need to place themselves in the exhibition, to belong in the space and to join the cultural dialogue. For museums, this is the basis for a new communicative frame of reference and a new pedagogics. This will be made possible at least in part through the new ...

Modalities of Representation

The emerging communications environment—in which image, sound and word are all made of the same stuff, and communicated using the same, digital technologies—provides new openings for museums, and new challenges.

Not only are museums challenged to preserve heritage which is increasingly ‘born digital’, there is also no collectable object, no site-specific experience, which cannot be reproduced and made available to ‘visitors’ at the ends of the earth though digital means of representation.

Unique challenges emerge in the realm of intellectual property, the practicalities of relating to visitors who are more diverse than ever, and exploring the communicative affordances of the ‘mutliteracies’ of digital representation.

In meeting these challlenges, museums are destined to reflect their changing world, and also—at times provocatively, riskily—change that world. The Museum Conference and Journal provide a forum for the discussion of these and other fundamental questions of the changing shape and role of museums.

Editors and Advisory Board

Editors |Advisory Board

Editors of the International Journal of the Inclusive Museum

  • Amareswar Galla,The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
  • Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

International Advisory Board

  • Professor Corazon S. Alvina, Director, National Museum of the Philippines, Manila, Philippines; Chairperson, Asia Europe Museums Network.
  • Professor Dr. Laishun An, Director, Department of Planning and Development, China Agriculture Exhibition Centre (China National Agricultural Museum), Beijing, China
  • Professor HC Jatti Bredekamp, Chief Executive Officer, Iziko Museums, (National Museums of South Africa), Cape Town, South Africa
  • Professor Dr. Bill Cope, University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign, USA.
  • Dr Christine Hemmet, Responsible de l'Asie, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France
  • Lucía Astudillo Loor, Directora, Museo de los Metales, Cuenca, Ecuador
  • Professor Dr. Pascal Makambila, Conservateur en chef des musées, Brazzaville, Congo
  • Mary L. Nucci, The Food Policy Institute, New Jersey, USA
  • Madame. Adi Mere Ratunabuabua, Principal Cultural Development Officer, Ministry of Fijian Affairs, Culture, Heritage and Regional Development, Suva, Fiji
  • Professor Dr. Tereza C. Moletta Scheiner, School of Museology, Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  • Amy Sodaro, New School for Social Research, New York, New York, USA
  • Dr. Lina G. Tahan, Senior Research Fellow, Tourism studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK; Centre d'Histoire sociale de l'Islam méditerranéen (CHSIM), Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. France
  • Professor W. Richard West, Jr. , Vice President, ICOM; Former Director, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, USA; Honorary Professor in Museum Studies, The University of Queensland.

Associate Editors


The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, Volume 1.doc (Download PDF)

Journal Profile

STATISTICS/CITATIONS

Statistics/Citations

At this stage we are unable to provide citation statistics as the journal is relatively new. However, we envisage a high impact factor insofar as the journal is both part of the conventional world of academic publishing and highly visible to internet search engines.


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