Shifting Spaces
Featured Children as Collaborators?: A Critical Reflection on Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stefanie Steinbeck
Children are a key demographic for museums to consider in their practices. Yet their experiences of visiting museums is under-researched in a context outside of learning. Whilst participatory research with younger visitors continues to develop as an area of research, there continues to be an emphasis on children as learning bodies, who are in the museum for educational purposes above everything else. Birch (2018) notes that to re-conceptualize how children are perceived and engaged within museums, it would be helpful to have more participatory research findings, which can reveal a broader picture of children’s embodied perspectives that are untethered to a learning trope. How might we detach the perception of being a child and being a learner?? What would such a detachment look like considering the museum’s consolidating role as an educational facility? Taking on these difficult questions, this paper reflects on the challenging nature of producing collaborative museum exhibitions with younger visitors. Framed around the research question ‘What kinds of tensions emerge in museum collaborations with children when the frame for the collaboration is challenged?’ the paper offers a reflective discussion around the authors’ experiences with broader collaborative museum research and exhibition development projects ranging from co-design to citizen science. Conceptually the paper turns to Freire’s (1993) pedagogy of the oppressed, to question whether museum professionals and scholars are genuinely able to consider children as "valued social actors and knowledge-bearer" if we only do collaborative work as a means to educate them.
A Comparative Study on Edutainment Activities within Museums Converted from Heritage Buildings and Museums as New Buildings View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Negin Nazari Moayed, Özlem Olgaç Türker
Museums as a cultural center have a significant role in achieving educational goals in order to contribute the improvement of the cultural level of society. Arranging entertainment activities together with the educational activities may help museums to be more effective. Entertainment activities increase the engagement of visitors and inspire learning. In this direction, entertainment and education are two inseparable components. In this respect, the term "edutainment" refers to learning or teaching something new, while having joyful activities. In this direction, the way of dealing with the architectural requirements for edutainment activities maybe different in ‘museums converted from heritage buildings’ and ‘museums as new buildings’, the main question of this research is how these two different groups serve the architectural and technological requirements of edutainment purposes. So, the research aims to investigate the architectural and technological facilities that are required for edutainment goals in two different groups of buildings, and make a comparison between them. The case studies are selected from museums which have been visited directly by authors from all around the world. The indicators, which are factors to serve the edutainment activities, are obtained from the literature surveying, using books, journals, and museum websites. The qualitative research method is applied through observational research by visiting the cases and evaluating the extracted factors on visited cases. Outcomes are illustrated in a comparative table. The findings are expected to contribute to adaptation processes of heritage buildings as museums, and hence conservation of architectural heritage instead of building new.
Art, Access, and Advocacy: Virtual Museums that Feature Underrepresented Artists or Subjects View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deborah Harris, Alison Williams, Sarah Hirsch
In this paper, I explore the advantages and disadvantages of virtual museums—especially those dealing with art featuring or made by underrepresented groups—in terms of accessibility, advocacy, and rhetorical effect. During the pandemic, traditional indoor museums had to close their doors and find novel ways to survive financially, to show their art in alternate ways, and to remain relevant in a time of international panic. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Art, Design & Architecture Museum was scheduled to open an in-person exhibit titled “Hostile Terrain 94” for the full year of 2020 that captured, through multiple modes, the many deaths at the US/Mexico border due to harsh conditions and other factors. As a result of Covid, the exhibit was moved online that March. The in-person exhibit relied on tactile factors and multiple senses to affect the patrons. The online exhibit lost many of those factors, using purely visual (and selectively auditory) elements of the virtual museum. Through the disciplinary lens of rhetoric and writing studies, I examine virtual museums including “Hostile Terrain 94” that are, or could be, sites of advocacy for underrepresented groups, issues, and artists, but that are shaped largely by their respective “locations.” After conducting a thorough visual and textual analysis of these sites, I conclude by describing the advantage of virtual museums in terms of access and inclusivity, but the loss of rhetorical effectiveness on prospective audiences.
Museum as Living Community: From Songzhuang Artist Residence to Xiangshan Art Commune View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yong Huang
Contemporary museums contribute to the place making of modern cities, and the architecture and public space of museums act not only as culture icons, but also generate interactive environment that transforms adjacent urban fabric into vibrant living communities. Located in Tongzhou District of Beijing, Songzhuang is the largest artist community in China. Avant-garde artists such as Yue Mngjun and Fang Lijun started to relocate in this village at the outskirt of Beijing since 1990s. With over 4000 artists in 2008, it becomes an evolving community not only for artists to create, to show, and to live, but also for individuals and communities to meet, to exchange as a boundless living museum. Ten years later, at the Cultural Industry Hub of Hangzhou, the historical Southern Imperial City, Xiangshang Art Commune was officially unveiled in December 2018. This creative community is adjacent to the new China Academy of Art campus designed by Pritzker laureate Wang Shu. It is intended to serve as a platform for international exchanges of art, art education, and creative industry. Through interviews of the design architects, artists, residents, and design educators, this paper explores a comparative study of these two projects, and investigates the emerging concept of museum as a living community within the context of neo-liberal urbanism in China.
Facing the Wrong Way: Representing Neurodiversity in Museums View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rebecca Louise-Clarke
In my study, 'Facing the Wrong Way', I ask: how can museums consider and affectively respond to the needs of neurodiverse visitors? In my creative, practice-led and auto-ethnographic approach, I discuss my research on neurodiversity-related museum collections and exhibitions at Australia's Museum Victoria (MV). My presentation incorporates poetry, film and experimental soundscape to portray my own lived experience of neurodiversity and the feelings and sensations I experience in museum settings.
