Museums and the Public Understanding of Science

Museums and the Public Understanding of Science PDF Author: John Durant
Publisher: NMSI Trading Ltd
ISBN: 9780901805492
Category : Museums
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
The essays in this volume are organised thematically. The first essay sets the scene by reviewing the present position and future potential of science museums as educational and cultural resources. The next section is devoted to the role of museum exhibitions and analyses how exhibitions deal with complex material. The third section is concerned with museum programmes and reports on the strengths and weaknesses of different museum programmes, ranging from gallery drama to the Boston Museum's innovative experiment with Science-by-mail.

Museums and the Public Understanding of Science

Museums and the Public Understanding of Science PDF Author: John Durant
Publisher: NMSI Trading Ltd
ISBN: 9780901805492
Category : Museums
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
The essays in this volume are organised thematically. The first essay sets the scene by reviewing the present position and future potential of science museums as educational and cultural resources. The next section is devoted to the role of museum exhibitions and analyses how exhibitions deal with complex material. The third section is concerned with museum programmes and reports on the strengths and weaknesses of different museum programmes, ranging from gallery drama to the Boston Museum's innovative experiment with Science-by-mail.

Creating Connections

Creating Connections PDF Author: David Chittenden
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759104761
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Science museums are in the business of making science accessible to the public--a public constantly bombarded with new information and research results. How the public understands this information will affect what they expect and take away from a museum's exhibits and programs. Creating Connections looks at the public understanding of research (PUR) and how it affects what science museums do. What are the opportunities and critical issues in PUR? What strategies are working and what are some pitfalls? What can be learned from the media's experiences with PUR? Creating Connections will be an invaluable resource for science museum professionals who want to guide their institutions and their visitors toward a new understanding of and appreciation for current research.

Science Museums in Transition

Science Museums in Transition PDF Author: Carin Berkowitz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822982757
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum's walls. Contributors examine a constellation of people, spaces, display practices, experiences, and politics that worked not only to define the museum, but to shape public science and scientific knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this volume span the Atlantic, exploring private and public museums, short and long-term exhibitions, and museums built for entertainment, education, and research, and in turn raise a host of important questions, about expertise, and about who speaks for nature and for history.

Idea Colliders

Idea Colliders PDF Author: Michael John Gorman
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262359200
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
A provocative call for the transformation of science museums into "idea colliders" that spark creative collaborations and connections. Today's science museums descend from the Kunst-und Wunderkammern of the Renaissance--collectors' private cabinets of curiosities--through the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 to today's "interactive" exhibits promising educational fun. In this book, Michael John Gorman issues a provocative call for the transformation of science museums and science centers from institutions dedicated to the transmission of cultural capital to dynamic "idea colliders" that spark creative collaborations and connections. This new kind of science museum would not stage structured tableaux of science facts but would draw scientists into conversation with artists, designers, policymakers, and the public. Rather than insulating visitors from each other with apps and audio guides, the science museum would consider each visitor a resource, bringing questions, ideas, and experiences from a unique perspective.

Life on Display

Life on Display PDF Author: Karen A. Rader
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022607983X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biological exhibitions to analyze museums’ shifting roles in twentieth-century American science and society. Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle profound changes in these exhibitions—and the institutions that housed them—between 1910 and 1990, ultimately offering new perspectives on the history of museums, science, and science education. Rader and Cain explain why science and natural history museums began to welcome new audiences between the 1900s and the 1920s and chronicle the turmoil that resulted from the introduction of new kinds of biological displays. They describe how these displays of life changed dramatically once again in the 1930s and 1940s, as museums negotiated changing, often conflicting interests of scientists, educators, and visitors. The authors then reveal how museum staffs, facing intense public and scientific scrutiny, experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education from the 1950s through the 1980s. The book concludes with a discussion of the influence that corporate sponsorship and blockbuster economics wielded over science and natural history museums in the century’s last decades. A vivid, entertaining study of the ways science and natural history museums shaped and were shaped by understandings of science and public education in the twentieth-century United States, Life on Display will appeal to historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of American science and culture, as well as museum practitioners and general readers.

The Politics of Display

The Politics of Display PDF Author: Sharon Macdonald
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136878793
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
The assumption that museum exhibitions, particularly those concerned with science and technology, are somehow neutral and impartial is today being challenged both in the public arena and in the academy. The Politics of Display brings together studies of contemporary and historical exhibitions and contends that exhibitions are never, and never have been, above politics. Rather, technologies of display and ideas about 'science' and 'objectivity' are mobilized to tell stories of progress, citizenship, racial and national difference. The display of the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is a well-known case in point. The Politics of Display charts the changing relationship between displays and their audience and analyzes the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive, multimedia and reflexive modes of display. The Politics of Display brings together an array of international scholars in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and history. Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology and industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine, and locations include the United States of America, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Spain. This book is an excellent contribution to debates about the politics of public culture. It will be of interest to students of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies and science studies.

Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums

Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums PDF Author: Fiona Cameron
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152755323X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums engages the highly problematic and increasingly important issue of museums, science centres, their roles in contemporary societies, their engagement with “hot” topics and their part in wider conversations in a networked public culture. Hot topics such as homosexuality, sexual, and racial violence, massacres, drugs, terrorism, GMO foods, H1M1 (swine flu) and climate change are now all part of museological culture. The authors in this collection situate cultural institutions in an increasingly interconnected, complex, globalising and uncertain world and engage the why and how institutions might form part of, activate conversations and action through discussions that theorise institutions in new ways to the very practical means in which institutions might engage their constituencies.

Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Certain Independent Agencies Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1980

Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Certain Independent Agencies Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1980 PDF Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on HUD-Independent Agencies
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 1532

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Book Description


Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums

Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums PDF Author: Yannik Porsché
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319663577
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
This book offers an interactionist perspective on theories of public representation, knowledge and immigration in museum institutions. Examining how a Franco-German museum exhibition represents immigrants and exposes public stereotypes, the analysis follows the process of the production and reception of the exhibition as it travelled from Paris to Berlin. The author proposes a microsociological contextualisation analysis integrating discourse analysis and ethnography to compare formats of museum work, social interaction in the exhibition and mass media debates. Visitor reception of the different exhibition versions reveals the symbolic nature of interactions in museums, for example concerning conflicting political voices and accusations of censorship. Depending on the institutional context, interactions in the museums are geared towards securing immigrants a place in national collective memory, towards carrying out debate on integration, or providing opportunities for personal encounters and reflection beyond national categorisation. This book will appeal to students and researchers interested in work on the intersection of sociology, cultural studies, and discursive psychology, in methods of discourse analysis and ethnography; and to practitioners working in museums.

Museums 2000

Museums 2000 PDF Author: Patrick Boylan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134910533
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The result of a debate organized by the Museums Association in 1989, between some of the world's leading museum professionals, active politicians, economists and marketing specialists, looking at real problems faced now and in the future.