Mobile museums : collections in circulation

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Imprint:

London : UCL Press, 2021 and ©2021

Subject:

Museums - Collection management
Museums - Collection management - Social aspects
Museum outreach programs - Social aspects
Museum exhibits

Contributor:

Driver, Felix, editor
Nesbitt, Mark, editor
Cornish, Caroline, editor

ISBN:

9781787355149, 1787355144, 9781787355200, and 1787355209

Description:

xx, 352 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Bibliographic Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Contents:

Introduction. Mobilising and re-mobilising museum collections / Felix Driver, Mark Nesbitt and Caroline Cornish -- Plant artefacts then and now: reconnecting biocultural collections in Amazonia / Luciana Martins -- Re-mobilising colonial collections in decolonial times: exploring the latent possibilities of N.W. Thomas's West African collections / Paul Basu -- Circuits of accumulation and loss: intersecting natural histories of the 1928 USDA New Guinea Sugarcane Expedition's collections / Joshua A. Bell -- Kew's mobile museum: economic botany in circulation / Caroline Cornish, Felix Driver and Mark Nesbitt -- Illustrating anthropological knowledge: texts, images and duplicate specimens at the Smithsonian Institution and Pitt Rivers Museum / Catherine A. Nichols -- Expeditionary collections: Haslar Hospital Museum and the circulation of public knowledge, 1815-1855 / Daniel Simpson -- Mobile botany: education, horticulture and commerce in New York botanical gardens, 1890s-1930s / Sally Gregory Kohlstedt -- Plants on the move: Kew Gardens and the London schoolroom / Laura Newman -- Circulations of paradise (or, how to use a specimen to best personal advantage) / Jude Philp -- Circulation as negotiation and loss: Egyptian antiquities from British excavations, 1880-present / Alice Stevenson -- Colonising memory: Indigenous heritage and community engagement / Claudia Augustat -- The flow of things: mobilising museum collections of nineteenth-century Fijian liku (fibre skirts) and veiqia (female tattooing) / Karen Jacobs -- Afterword. What goes around, comes around : mobility's modernity / Martha Fleming

Summary:

"Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, past and present. It brings together an impressive array of international scholars and curators from a wide variety of disciplines - including the history of science, museum anthropology and postcolonial history - to consider the mobility of collections. The book combines historical perspectives on the circulation of museum objects in the past with contemporary accounts of their re-mobilisation, notably in the context of Indigenous community engagement. Contributors seek to explore processes of circulation historically in order to re-examine, inform and unsettle common assumptions about the way museum collections have evolved over time and through space. By foregrounding questions of circulation, the chapters in Mobile Museums collectively represent a fundamental shift in the understanding of the history and future uses of museum collections. The book addresses a variety of different types of collection, including the botanical, the ethnographic, the economic and the archaeological. Its perspective is truly global, with case studies drawn from South America, West Africa, Oceania, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK. Mobile Museums helps us to understand why the mobility of museum collections was a fundamental aspect of their history and why it continues to matter today"-- Provided by publisher

Access Restrictions:

Open access

Collection:

BGC Monograph Stacks

Call Number:

AM133 .M63 2021

Available

c.1