Reculturing Museums: Embrace Conflict, Create Change - Softcover

Ash, Doris B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598745220 ISBN 13: 9781598745221

Publisher: Routledge, 2022

Synopsis

Reculturing Museums takes a unified sociocultural theoretical approach to analyze the many conflicts museums experience in the 21st century. Embracing conflict, Ash asks: What can practitioners and researchers do to create the change they want to see when old systems remain stubbornly in place?

Using a unified sociocultural, cultural-historical, activity-theoretical approach to analyzing historically bound conflicts that plague museums, each chapter is organized around a central contradiction, including finances ("Who will pay for museums?"), demographic shifts ("Who will come to museums?"), the roles of narratives ("Whose story is it?"), ownership of objects ("Who owns the artifact?"), and learning and teaching ("What is learning and how can we teach equitably?"). The reculturing stance taken by Ash promotes social justice and equity, ‘making change’ first, within museums, called inreach, rather than outside the museum, called outreach; challenges existing norms; is sensitive to neoliberal and deficit ideologies; and pays attention to the structure agency dialectic.

Reculturing Museums will be essential reading for academics, students, museum practitioners, educational researchers, and others who care about museums and want to ensure that all people have equal access to the activities, objects, and ideas residing in them.

About this title

About the Author

Doris B. Ash is Professor Emerita in science education in the education department at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1598745220
• ISBN 13: 9781598745221
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330