New Book: Museum Theory

The Alfred Deakin Institute's Deputy Director (Governance), Andrea Witcomb, has had her newest edited book, 'Museum Theory', published by Wiley Blackwells.

Coedited with Kylie Message, 'Museum Theory' considers the politics of crisis and conjuncture which can lead to contextual, theoretical and pragmatic changes in the way museums work, are understood and experienced. In doing so, it pays attention to points of conjunction and the processes by which fragmentation, dissonance and crisis occur.

The volume has been designed to offer critical perspectives on the museum (as an institution) and on museums (as a series of individual specificities and contingencies) from a range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. In this way it moves beyond theoretically-driven analyses of museums toward a situated form of theorizing about museums.

As a result, chapters theorize relationships between museums, knowledge, and experience, and open up dialogue between museums and the academy. The book probes links between museum studies and other disciplinary formations (such as cultural studies, art history, anthropology, natural history, and history) in ways that speak to the opportunities such conversations have both to theorise museums and also to use museums to do theoretical work.

The book is framed around three themes:

• Thinking about museums, which focusses on understanding the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere;

• Disciplines and politics, which presents work by scholars based in specific disciplines and with particular theoretical orientations who consider contemporary museums from the point of view of those interests; and

• Theory from practice/practising theory: in which work beginning with – and often in – the museums, reaches out to, and across, a range of disciplines in an attempt to theorize, better understand, and challenge what is happening within museums and disciplinary frameworks.

The book is the first volume in the 'International Handbooks of Museum Studies' series published by Wiley Blackwell. The handbooks represent a state-of-the-art survey of the burgeoning field of museum studies.

Read more about the series: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781118829059/homepage/EditorsContributors.html

Contact: Andrea Witcomb

Phone: 03 925 17232