In this essay I analyse the 'ideas', 'philosophies', 'contexts' and 'companions' of several recent museum studies anthologies, and examine whether they respond to key issues facing museums today. I am particularly interested in how effectively these anthologies represent social inclusion and diversity discourses, how they account for outreach programs that aim to link museums and communities, and how they engage with the more general work, experience, and critical analysis of museums and museum contexts globally.

Underlining the textual analysis is an examination of why contemporary museums have recently expressed a heightened interest in promoting their potential as research institutions. Although the idea of research they have adopted is informed by the new museology and follows a more nuanced mode of practice than that employed by museums in the past, I contend that research has been recognised as a strategy that will help museums break from the 'new museum' tag, at the same time as it allows them to demonstrate their commitment to the improved community relationships that emerge out of research and development programs (which also contribute to national interests of innovation and creative economies).

The anthologies reviewed are: Sharon Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2006; Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries, Routledge, London and New York, 2005; Bettina Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2004; Hugh H Genoways (ed.), Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century, AltaMira Press, Oxford, 2006, and Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (eds), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004.

____________________________________________________

In a 1990 review of Peter Vergo's 1989 anthology, The New Museology,[1] Sharon Macdonald argued, vis-a-vis Vergo, that to partake in the new museology, museums and their commentators must 'bring to the foreground those social, philosophical and political questions that have as yet been scarcely tackled'. This was important, she explained, because:

So far much of the research that has been done on museums has worked within their own terms of reference: it has focused on issues internal to museums rather than attempting to explore or question the premisses that museums lay claim to. For example, a good deal of research (much of it very interesting and worthwhile) has been done on education in museums, but very little of this has asked whether education is what museums really are or should be about, nor are questions around such issues as social control typically raised.[2]

Macdonald's review reminds us what life was like before Tony Bennett's essay, 'The exhibitionary complex', changed the approach of museum criticism for good.[3] Although his essay was initially published in 1988, it did not receive wider attention until publication of The Birth of the Museum,[4] but Bennett has since become a standard inclusion in any museum studies university program and most anthologies that cater for these.[5] Macdonald ultimately argued that although The New Museology is based on rather thin research and analysis that is emergent rather than fully developed, the conceptual approaches and frameworks offered by contributors are astute and engaging. As one example of this, she highlighted the Bourdieusian approach being trialled at the time by Nick Merriman, and she commended the book's attempts to understand and demonstrate the relationship between social equality discourses and museums (which would provide a historical context for the work by Richard Sandell and others on museums and contemporary approaches to equity and social inclusion policies). In the final analysis, Macdonald revealed herself as a particularly canny participant–observer of the emergent field of museum studies that she would, along with others in the United Kingdom (Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Susan Pearce), the United States (Carol Duncan, Kenneth Hudson, Stephen Weil, Ivan Karp), Australia (Tony Bennett), and elsewhere, substantially contribute to. 'Perhaps', said Macdonald, 'The New Museology will turn out to have been particularly aptly titled, for it may mark the early stages of a new movement (and perhaps even a boom) of research into museums and heritage'.[6]

Macdonald's plea for greater academic analysis of museums and their contexts becomes even more fascinating in light of Charles Saumarez Smith's recent review of Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago's 2004 anthology Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum and Bettina Messias Carbonell's 2004 anthology Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts.[7] Saumarez Smith is director of the National Gallery, London, and also contributed to Vergo's groundbreaking anthology. Suggesting that Macdonald's earlier call for museums to achieve greater critical academic attention has not only come to fruition, but that it has possibly gone too far, Saumarez Smith decries both these anthologies on the basis that they offer very little for those who actually work in museums:

The question necessarily arises as to whether or not it matters that students of art history and museum studies should be subjected to such a relentless Foucault-ian critique of the role of the museum in public culture. Obviously, as someone who works in a museum, I am inclined to think that it does. It tends to negate the levels of skill that are required by museums to document, interpret and, in some cases, identify objects and works of art.[8]

Despite his reassertion of the distinction between museum practitioners and theorists,[9] Saumarez Smith has contributed to Macdonald's latest anthology. In what I interpret to be Macdonald's acknowledgement of the contribution Saumarez Smith has made to the development of the new museology in the twenty years since Vergo adopted and popularised this phrase, she has placed his essay — a piece appropriately titled 'The Future of the Museum' — as the provocative final chapter of her volume, A Companion to Museum Studies.[10] Published in the year after the appearance of both the Preziosi and Farago and Carbonell volumes, Macdonald's Companion attends more consciously to the professional side of contemporary museum practice, as well as catering for the 'increasingly large army of students and cultural critics who wander around museums'.[11]

Sharon Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies

Blackwell, 2006

This essay developed as a review of Sharon Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies, Blackwell, Boston, 2006; Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries, Routledge, London and New York, 2005; Bettina Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2004; Hugh H Genoways (ed.), Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century, AltaMira Press, Oxford, 2006, and Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (eds), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004. I expected to situate the review through a discussion about the relationships between museums, education and the public, but in the process of reading across these volumes, the paper transformed into a critical engagement with a set of themes that have become prevalent for museums and the study of museums today — most importantly those directed towards Indigenous access, participation, agency and ownership, and the associated attempts to engage with the history, theory and practice of museums according to a postcolonial mode of analysis. Hence, this paper builds on the observations and commentaries that are presented in these anthologies, yet also aims to engage more directly with museums' remit to education and their aim to produce meaningful engagements with a local or national polity as well as the community sector and the diverse publics which constitute civic society. I approach this study by focusing on the renewed civics of the museum, and examine the relationship between museums and the public sphere to ask whether the return to academic research and the valuing of cultural knowledge has enhanced public understanding about our historical past as well as our understanding of the present and future. Following the questions posed by the volumes, I explore whether this focus on knowledge and research might help us address the major social and cultural challenges of the future.

My general intention is to bring the traditional museological focus on education into dialogue with the more overarching responsibility of museums to provide a public good. While the former is often associated with the post-Second World War professionalisation of museum practice that accompanied the major boom in museum production at this time,[12] the latter received a surge of interest resulting from the post-1989 attention to Jürgen Habermas's ideas about the public sphere.[13] Interest in a renewed public sphere has been promoted by Third Way public policy agendas in the United Kingdom and Aotearoa New Zealand, and has also been associated with both liberal and conservative ideas about communitarianism in Australia and the United States. The term 'communitarianism' describes a preference for civil society that is geared towards the collective and generalised normative interests of the community, rejecting the particularities of radical individuality. According to the controversial American political scientist, Robert Putnam, the social networks created when people do things for each other are the basis for forming the social capital that is a vital component for building and maintaining democracy.[14] Accordingly, governments influenced by Third Way policy tend to encourage the development of social capital — where citizens abide by a moral code of individual responsibility and community obligation — for the purpose of creating and maintaining a greater national good.

While there is no doubt that many museums from the mid-nineteenth century onward have functioned as agents of social reform, the convergence of economic reform, social policy and public accountability — as key performance indicators used to evaluate public sector institutions against the achievement of social policy objectives — is new. Tied up with Third Way aspirations to motivate an 'active' citizenry that is defined by those who are 'able to take part in the social, political, cultural as well as the economic life of society',[15] this has created the need for museums to contribute concrete outcomes towards the building of social capital via the development of interpersonal networks, often under the banner of urban redevelopment.[16] Although this new interest has provided greater possibilities for community and regional museums to attract funding from the state, this same public accountability has also posed a series of challenges emanating from the requirements to meet policy-directed milestones of social inclusion and social cohesion.[17]

In order to analyse the way the anthologies account for the interaction between museums and the public good, it may be useful to begin by acknowledging the role that museums often play in the development and dissemination of social and cultural management programs, and by recognising that their authority is due to their connections with current policy initiatives (of social inclusion and cultural diversity, for instance). Given that these connections frequently lead to the concern that museums are acting directly in the service of the nationalising interests of the state, how do these volumes challenge — as Hugh Genoways asserts — the very idea of the museum?[18] Alternatively, do these volumes represent particular kinds of museums (such as cultural centres) as provoking or embodying this challenge? And how do the writers account for the increasing demands that museums become ever more accountable to the public — for funding, for instance — by actively servicing and contributing to the dominant ideas and languages of public well-being that follow on from rejuvenated ideas about a shared but pluralistic civic sphere.

The diversity of essays collected in the body of volumes (and the vast size of two of the books) invites the impression that they may form a body of literature that can bring together two streams of contemporary museum studies that are often discussed separately. The first stream correlates with the remit to education, and is constituted by literature that examines the impact of social inclusion policies on museums (where existing work tends to be UK-based).[19] Museums are identified as sites of organised education that contribute to ideas privileged by the national good, as articulated though social policy directives such as multiculturalism.[20] The second stream correlates with the renewed interest in the public, and seeks to develop local museums and cultural centres through diverse partnerships with governments on the understanding that museums may facilitate community development through outreach programs and by encouraging increased participation in the museum itself. This idea emerged out of the French ecomuseum and now resonates for museums and cultural centres that promote postcolonial strategies and outcomes.[21] These streams of museum studies come together through their shared attention to the potential role museums may play as agents of and activists for social inclusion. While collectively they promote the concept of an inclusive museum as one that tackles social exclusion within the cultural sphere, cultural centre-like museums are more explicitly directed towards encouraging dialogue that emerges from communities, to assert the agency of Indigenous people and their authority over the museums and collections.[22] In both cases, commentators principally engage with museums that seek to increase audience access and participation and that aim to develop ways of representing collections and histories that reflect a more reciprocal or contested set of relationships. However while some museums implement strategies of inclusion that are directed towards the production of positive outcomes in relation to other spheres beyond the institution, others continue to reproduce 'social management' or 'social governance' systems.[23]

Gerard Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries

Routledge, 2005

In a sense, then, I want to instrumentalise the volumes under review to argue that the conceptual frameworks they apply to the analysis of contemporary museums reflect broader attempts to encourage intersection between various sites of debate, including the governmental and the 'disconnected' academic and public realms identified by sociologist Craig Calhoun.[24] Museums and cultural centres are important to this discussion because they are often represented as existing at the interface of cultural and social policies (public and governmental discourses) and academic debates over the role of culture in liberal practices of government. In seeking to bring the fields of theory and professional practice together by highlighting their shared interests (or points of intersection), my approach is sympathetic to Gerard Corsane's aim to develop 'an ideal democratic process for heritage, museum and gallery work',[25] and picks up the point he makes in the introduction to Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader:

Discourses on heritage, museums and galleries have become a massive, complex and organic network of often loosely articulated understandings of ideas, issues and ways of perceiving things; a network that is fluid, dynamic, and constantly reconfiguring itself as individuals critically reflect on and engage with it.[26]

Corsane's volume is notable for promoting demotic, inclusive and transparent practices that develop through increased public participation (and decision-making) in association with a clearly defined and explicitly articulated postcolonial framework of social inclusion that also emphasises the contribution and expertise of heritage professionals. His focus on process and participation offers a sophisticated expansion of the 'museum as forum' paradigm that flourished rhetorically in discussions and debates about national museums (and their role in the culture wars) throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This is a well-crafted volume that builds a cohesive argument from the individual essays included. Corsane argues that his volume produces a 'model' of practice. In so doing, it challenges the terms of museological reference by asking museum studies to enter into discussion with — and in some cases be accountable to — the more politically engaged ideas motivating cultural and social policy (the links between culture and power), postcolonial politics, concepts of civic society and the public sphere, international relations and globalisation. In many ways, this volume responds most successfully to Saloni Mathur's critique of current museology, and her subsequent call for a critical museum studies that goes further in its attempt to 'produce curators, thinkers, and cultural critics who are alert to the social processes of our time'. According to Mathur, '[t]he kind of cultural criticism that we call postcolonial is indispensable to the task of thinking critically about discrepant kinds of global practices, and is therefore an important set of perspectives, I believe, for a critical museum studies in the twenty-first century'.[27]

Understanding that museums have shifting roles, responsibilities and realms of action invokes the idea that the museum might be able to provide a kind of mediation between the government and the public. This perception has evolved out of James Clifford's idea of the museum as contact zone to demonstrate that while the museum continues to influence society, 'society' also intervenes in the meanings produced by museums.[28] This understanding may fail to challenge the instrumental function of museums (to act on the social) within communities (whereby they work to educate individuals to become compliant, self-regulating citizens who model privileged notions of identity gained from social, economic, environmental and cultural theories of well-being). However, it may still offer a useful way to move beyond idealistic conceptions of the museum as offering a neo-Habermasian public sphere existing between the state and economy. Although Nick Prior claims that 'it has, at least, become possible for museums to inhabit a more democratic, open-ended "third space," beyond elitism and consumerism',[29] I would suggest that new museums have been located consciously and precisely at the point of intersection between these terms in order to capitalise on the opportunities made available by these spheres, as well as the 'the tension-charged field between state and society' in between.[30] This is evidenced by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa's client-driven focus (see the museum's corporate principles),[31] and may be illustrated more immediately by the commodification of high culture that is offered by blockbuster shows. According to Bennett:

In Australia, for example, museums were parts of a public sphere that was nurtured into existence by government rather than having an earlier history in a pre-existing and separate realm ... There was, to put the point bluntly, no point at which these institutions had ever been developed in opposition to, or in critique of, the state in a way that would make it intelligible to view their integration into government as a structural transformation of an earlier condition. In Australia, public culture was thoroughly governmentalized from the outset.[32]

Despite their interdisciplinary and multiple agendas, the volumes by Corsane, Genoways, Macdonald, Carbonell, and Preziosi and Farago can collectively be used to demonstrate that museums function primarily as a site of nexus that employ current, politically motivated approaches to education and outreach to inform, if not create, a public that is responsive to a series of normative models of acceptable behaviour. The first of these approaches frames the historical expectation of modern western museums to develop metanarratives of civic unity, whereby industrial progress and self-improvement are jointly directed towards achieving the public good via education. The Australian historian Graeme Davison refers to this hegemonic process as 'the education of people to fit them for democratic citizenship'.[33] The contemporary promotion of diversity and social inclusion as defined and described by global policy is then brought into dialogue with this first discussion. While this secondary diversity discourse is also produced at both global and national levels, it risks enhancing rather than challenging the complicity contemporary museums may have with a range of historical projects that have employed what Bennett has called 'contrived and carefully monitored "civic experiments" directed at target populations (the workingman, children, migrants)' to produce 'a range of new entities' that then 'act on the social in various ways'.[34] Through his work on contemporary forms of citizenship, British social theorist Nikolas Rose has expanded on Bennett's point about the ongoing role of governance (government at a distance), although Rose identifies 'community' — rather than 'the social' — as the key surface of government, arguing that community both hosts and embodies the relationship between an ethical citizenship and a responsible community that is 'fostered, but not administered, by the state'.[35]

Rose's theory also problematises the idealised forum, civic space and public sphere that are sometimes seen to exist 'between the state and the economy, the realm of free association where citizens can interact to pursue their shared interests'.[36] While various writers have argued that this ideal can simply never exist, Rose comes at the discussion sideways to demonstrate how this space — which he also associates with community — is not free from governmental influence. In a statement that interconnects with Bennett's historicisation of social governance, Rose argues that the media forms of the twenty-first century — of which the museum can certainly be considered one — continue to partake in civilising projects, but that these now aim at achieving different goals:

The uniform social citizenship that was the objective of the citizen-forming and nation-building strategies of the 19th and 20th centuries is now challenged by diverse forms of identity and allegiance that are no longer deferential to such a territorialized image of national and civic culture. The question now is not one of national character but of the way in which multiple identities receive equal recognition in a single constitutional form.[37]

In addition, we can note that the relationships between museums, the pluralistic and contested public sphere and the public service — and the associated 'utility' of museums — is complicated further by having developed out of the commitment to education and the aim to produce meaningful engagements with a local or national polity and community. While Sandell suggests political reasons and competition for public funding may be principally responsible for this retooling of museums towards concepts of social inclusion and well-being,[38] American museum theorist Stephen Weil has argued that the dedication of American museums to public service could be traced to the 1974 amendment to the statutes of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which stated that to be considered 'eligible' for membership to ICOM, museums must 'have among their characteristics the purpose of serving (in an earlier iteration) "the community" or (in ICOM's current definition) "society and ... its development"'.[39] This amendment makes clear links between museums and their potential contribution to social development. The emphasis on what Weil calls 'social service' was further recognised in 1998 at a meeting attended by delegates from both the American Association of Museums and ICOM.[40]

Bettina Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts

Blackwell, 2004

It is important to expand upon this discussion further by recognising that the variously labelled 'utility of culture' or 'culture-as-resource' theories that present museums as purposeful institutions by pairing them up with social policy has been widely debated by scholars of contemporary cultural studies, development studies, and cultural policy studies as well as museum studies.[41] From the mid-1970s scholars have presented ideas about the utility of culture as germane to the new museology, a connection that was strengthened through an association with ecomuseums. For instance, in the editorial for a 1985 edition of Museum (a UNESCO journal), Hugues de Varine drew on Georges Henri Rivière's definition of the ecomuseum (as an 'instrument' conceived and operated jointly by a public authority and a local population), to discuss the emergence of 'a movement of criticism and reform incorporating new developments in the social and human sciences with the aim of revitalising techniques of display, exhibition, and communication, and, ultimately, altering traditional relationships between the institution [of the museum] and the public'.[42]

However, these reform strategies and 'the new museum idea' (also called 'the modern museum idea') were exercised a century earlier by secretary of the Smithsonian, George Brown Goode, who published a paper called 'Museums and Good Citizenship' in 1894,[43] and who argued on another occasion that '[t]he appreciation of the utility of Museums to the great public lies at the foundation of what is known as "the modern Museum idea"; its development together with libraries, reading rooms, and parks "referred to by some wise person as passionless reformers"...is due to Great Britain in much greater degree than to any other nation'.[44] In this passage, Goode cited the Great Exhibition of 1851, John Ruskin's promotion of working-class museums, and the work of Sir Henry Cole. The guiding precept is printed in capital letters: 'THE DEGREE OF CIVILIZATION TO WHICH ANY NATION, CITY OR PROVINCE HAS ATTAINED IS BEST SHOWN BY THE CHARACTER OF ITS PUBLIC MUSEUMS AND THE LIBERALITY WITH WHICH THEY ARE MAINTAINED'.[45]

Goode saw museums as instruments of adult education and argued that they should develop stronger relationships with newly introduced state schooling systems in Australia, Britain and the United States.[46] In her evaluation of the historical connections between museums and social reform, Annie E Coombes begins an essay (that is included in the anthology edited by Carbonell as well as that by Preziosi and Farago) by quoting Salman Rushdie: 'And so it is interesting to remember that when Mahatma Gandhi ... came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilisation, he replied, "I think it would be a good idea"'.[47] Coombes's paper examines the connections between education, museums, the production of cohesive symbols of national identity (and unity) and developing public policy initiatives alongside the ideology of the public good that emerged in relation to European, Indian, American and colonial museums (and international world's fairs) from the mid-nineteenth century — and which, she argues, continues to have currency today in relation to inclusive models of social policy such as multiculturalism.

Reiterating the ideological shift towards the production of public spaces which offered democratic access (for the good of those who entered), museums from the mid-nineteenth century onward have increasingly demonstrated changes in the way authority is depicted and socially administered. They both replicated and implemented the new methods of order and truth associated with the shifting power structures of the modern world. And, as implied by Goode's writing, museums have been influenced heavily by the rational reform discourses of Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Thomas Greenwood and Henry Cole, so that the nineteenth-century public museum was consciously developed to be an institution of reform and governance that would transcend class barriers.[48] According to Coombes, the links between education and museums were further strengthened in 1902 (a year that marked the renewed promotion of a homogeneous national identity and social unity within Britain) when the Education Act projected the slogan 'Education for All', and made provision within the school curriculum for trips to museums. Indicating how potentially oppositional subjects could be incorporated into, and thus made complicit with the hierarchies of the state, this also illustrates the government's recognition of the educational, 'civilising', potential of these institutions. Coombes explains:

The Empire was to provide the panacea for all ills, the answer to unemployment with better living conditions for the working classes and an expanded overseas market for surplus goods. Through the policy of what was euphemistically referred to as 'social imperialism', all classes could be comfortably incorporated into a programme of expansionist economic policy in the colonies coupled with the promise of social reforms at home. It was in this context that museums and in particular the ethnographic sections, attempted to negotiate a position of relative autonomy, guided by a code of professional and supposedly disinterested ethics, while at the same time proposing themselves as useful tools in the service of the colonial administration.[49]

The agendas and advocacy of professional associations such as the British Museums Association in the late nineteenth century and the American Association of Museums in the post-Second World War period contributed to further legitimise connections between professional research (expertise) and public education.[50] Speaking in relation to the late nineteenth century, Bennett explains that museum curators, directors, education officers and others mediated the relations between 'specific knowledges (anthropology, archaeology and natural history, for example, as well as theories of perception) and the technical forms of their institutional deployment in ways that were calculated to involve individuals in their own self-governance and self-development'.[51] He expands this to assert that '"the new museum idea" is linked to the new liberalism and the new education movement'.[52]

In a contemporary context, the new museum idea is linked to neoliberalism and continues to support the strategies and rationale of public education. These connections, and the central role that education continues to play, are demonstrated most clearly by a report — Knowledge and Inspiration: The Democratic Face of Culture — commissioned by Britain's Museums Libraries Archives Council in 2006. The report endorses the idea (quoted from Ruth Kelly, British Secretary of State for Education), that 'Education is one of the keys to social mobility, and so we must make sure that a good education is available to every child in every country',[53] and positions museums as fundamental to achieving this goal. Throughout the last decade, links between museums (culture) and social policy outcomes have been formalised through Third Way models of thinking commonly associated with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the left-wing think tank, Demos, in the United Kingdom; with sociologist Anthony Giddens's 1998 book, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy; and with the Third Way approaches undertaken by Aotearoa New Zealand.[54] The Third Way is a phrase, a political program and a set of guiding moral principles that sought to reinvent social democratic and labour parties in response to the wave of neoliberalism that swept throughout the world during the 1980s and 1990s. Writing for a Demos publication, Hargreaves and Christie articulate the political contest of the Third Way as: 'how to balance prosperity with social inclusion, capitalism with community, how to modernise welfare systems, public services and labour markets, how to deepen democracy and how to connect progressive politics with the imperative of ecological sustainability'.[55]

It is important for museum studies scholars to keep these historical and political environments in mind because they provide a framework that links the work by Bennett, Coombes, Robert Rydell and others to Elizabeth Crooke's more recent proposition that '[t]he concern to make museums relevant to the "community" has swiftly moved to combining museums with some of the key social policy issues, such as tackling exclusion, building cohesive communities, and contributing to community regeneration'.[56] Examples of the purposive association of museums and social policy exist throughout the United Kingdom, the United States, the Pacific, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, where dominant ideas about the educational function of museums continue to be underwritten by concepts of the public good that have been rejuvenated and refashioned through Third Way discourses. This relationship is immediately evident in Museum Victoria's strategic plan, which emphasises the promotion of community engagement and social inclusion. According to its vision, 'Museum Victoria will reach out to an increasingly diverse audience through its collections and associated knowledge, using innovative programs that engage and fascinate. We will contribute to our community's understanding of the world, and ensure that our inheritance is augmented and passed on to future generations'.[57]

In Aotearoa New Zealand, utility of culture discourses are often directed towards the ability of museums to develop local partnerships — such as the iwi and community exhibitions produced by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, as well as outreach programs, and the travelling Treaty2U exhibition that resulted from a collaboration between Te Papa Tongarewa, Archives New Zealand, the National Library of New Zealand, the State Services Commission (SSC) Treaty Information Unit, and many local regions.[58] Local partnerships are further promoted through the statutory inclusion of 'cultural well-being' in the New Zealand Local Government Act 2002.[59] While links between museums and communities have been multi-sectoral in some cases in the United States, they have most often developed from museums and community organisations (such as the Smithsonian's outreach programs) and been promoted through the American Association of Museums, rather than directed government initiatives or policy frameworks.[60] As successful examples, Crooke cites a 1995 scheme in Philadelphia called 'Museums in the Life of a City', which was followed up in 1998 by the 'Museums and Community Initiative'. According to Crooke, this was 'regarded as a way of strengthening the relationship between museums and their communities across the US'.[61]

Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (eds), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum

Ashgate, 2004

Macdonald's volume wisely announces that it seeks to provide a retrospective 'review' of the new museology and its futures, rather than a comprehensive overview of museums, or an assertion of the most cutting-edge museological practice and theory. In many ways, her text is designed to follow on from Carbonell's, which is also a Blackwell edition, but distinguished by its attempt to provide a series of historical accounts for the development of museums, and encounters between museums, museum studies, and various other academic disciplines. As if in response to various reviews of Grasping the Museum that berated the editors for failing to challenge the ideas of singularity that are evident in the title's focus on 'the idea' of 'the museum' and replicated throughout the volume's singular art-historical framework,[62] Macdonald has stressed heterogeneity, difference, and distinction throughout her editorial commentaries and essay selection.

The key essay of the second part of Macdonald's Companion, 'Histories, heritage, identities' (at least according to my reading) is Crooke's essay, because it offers a nexus that encourages a loose collocation of themes central to the volume. Asserting that 'the very idea of the museum is being challenged through community involvement', Crooke's essay immediately stands out as having potential to bring the social inclusion agenda of some museum scholars into dialogue with the postcolonial, community-based interests advocated by others who work in the fields of culture, heritage and sustainability — often in the context of community museums, cultural centres and ecomuseums.[63] This connection is developed further when Crooke draws on Sandell to contend: 'The evaluation of museums and community development provides an understanding of the purpose of community in public policy and how the arts and museum sectors are now playing an active role in achieving these aims'.[64] Her paper provides a very simple and informative introduction to discussions about the interaction between museum studies and social development and public policy studies, although her analysis may have benefited from some discussion of governmentality vis-a-vis the chapters by Rydell, Rhiannon Mason and Gordon Fyfe. Further to this, the applied, pragmatic approach undertaken by Crooke may have facilitated the call made in an earlier chapter by Mason to 'capture the complexity of museums as cultural phenomena' — as well as demonstrate her associated preference for research that 'seeks to locate itself at the intersection of theory and practice'.[65] In summarising the links between museums, community and the ideals of social development, Crooke explains:

The examples of how museums have been linked with community in both the UK and American museum sectors contain two strands: one which is asking museums to recognise the diversity of the communities that they must serve, and the second, which is attempting to establish museums as social agents that can contribute to the alleviation of social problems. The first strand is concerned with building bridges to new audiences by having more representative collections, practices, and histories within the museum. The second strand is related to a movement that is outside the museum, one that is linked to the priorities of social and public life. Both strands are concerned with the survival of the museum, with a re-evaluation of the purpose of museums and with establishing their relevance.[66]

The volumes by both Macdonald and Corsane suggest an increasing dialogue between topics including heritage, non-western museums, the (rightly contested) idea of community and community museums, and commodity culture, globalisation and the changing business of museums, within a consciously drawn frame of museum studies (Macdonald is also a contributor to Corsane's volume). Yet, the intent expressed in these volumes, to draw points of connection between theory and practice, might suggest an opening for a greater analysis of cultural policy which, according to George Yúdice and Toby Miller, links aesthetic and anthropological registers of culture (while museums and other cultural institutions enable and support creativity and collective ways of life by soliciting, training, distributing, financing, and rejecting actors and activities).[67] An additional chapter, either written by, or discussing the work of Yúdice — as a prominent cultural (policy) studies scholar working on Latin American case studies — might offer an interesting examination of tensions between regional centres and practices and overarching American sociopolitical and economic contexts.[68] This may also communicate the point that in seeking to redistribute the national heritage according to discrete environmental cultures (or geographical contexts and boundaries), the ecomuseums and community-focused cultural centres that were the harbingers of the new museology movement also risk contributing to the effective and problematic 'regionalisation of the social', whereby the social is conceptualised to exist under the banner of regionally (and reductively) defined communities.[69]

Such a contribution might offer another way into understanding the application of cultural theory to policy outcomes, to facilitate the reader's understanding that museums function both as agents of governmentality as well as vehicles that actively challenge, subvert, or refuse the terms of dominant hegemonic discourse. The focus on citizenship that emerges through this study might also remind us that we need to account for the role museums play in the social, political and economic lives of people who may not even be interested in museums. The significance and double-edged nature of the intersections that emerge and exist between museums, culture, social policy, diverse and pluralistic publics is expressed, for instance, by Miller and Yúdice when they say:

Ethico-aesthetic exercise is necessary for the responsible individual — a means to better citizenship. This ethico-aesthetic exercise also has a postmodern version: culture is the legitimising ground on which particular groups ... can make a claim for resources and inclusion in the national narrative, if only to decentre it. They do so by calling on the alibis used to privilege specific cultural forms on behalf of the totality of the social.[70]

Yet approaches differ, and while the aim of Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century is to develop a new starting point for the discipline (which, according to Preziosi in the same volume, is simply an impossibility),[71] Carbonell in her edition returns to Vergo's early focus on the question of 'purposes' as well as 'methods' to centralise questions that ask 'why' as well as 'how'. Clearly indebted to the frequently quoted observation made by Weil in 1999 that museums have undergone a shift from 'being about something to being for somebody',[72] Carbonell has solicited contributions from a wider field than that nominated by Genoways, and draws on 'various' voices that include 'those for whom the museum is a "profession," those for whom it is a subject of study, those for whom it has traditionally seemed reductive, remote, exclusionary, or otherwise misrepresentative'.[73] She follows contemporary thinking to clearly articulate reasons why museums may want to put their framing mechanisms on display and produce exhibitions that engage critically with the materials and exhibitionary structures that they employ — although it may have been interesting to see whether this might have been further developed by drawing, for instance, on Sandell who argues that exhibitions can disseminate information, raise awareness and counter prejudice through a process of 'reframing difference'.[74]

Carbonell's editorial attention to framing contributes to her suggestion that the decision to expose, exhibit, or reveal the exhibitionary complex may not actually be a choice made by progressive museums, but a necessary condition of contemporary culture in general, and a symptom of the new museum itself.[75] Accordingly, new museums present a dedication to reveal their own ideological frameworks and pedagogical structures as a matter of requirement; they are compelled to do so because an important aspect of the new museum is a heightened commitment to political awareness and sociopolitical currency. In order to be properly and most persuasively regarded as new, they must appear invested in and responsive to the political context surrounding the museum, and in order to achieve this, they must appear to be engaged critically with issues pertaining to their own political structure. Adopting this approach may be the only way that museums can contribute to Andreas Huyssen's goal of achieving a 'genuinely heteronational' culture that 'no longer feels the need to homogenize and is learning how to live pragmatically with real difference',[76] although they also clearly demonstrate Janet Marstine's response that '[p]art of the problem is that battles are fought locally, based on an individual institution's exhibition or policy'.[77] This argument is also extended by the wide array of different case studies and national contexts included in Corsane's volume, including non-western and non-metropolitan museums, as well as ecomuseums, community museums, and national museums situated in postcolonial (post-settler) countries.

Hugh H Genoways (ed.), Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century

AltaMira Press, 2006

Having opened between 1998 and 2001, Te Papa, the Melbourne Museum and the National Museum of Australia have all moved into operational mode. They've transgressed the initial period of excitement and controversy, and are now aiming to develop excellence in research as well as sustained relationships with the stakeholder groups which they represent and seek to integrate within and throughout the operational systems and structures of the museum. These museums now present themselves as existing at the intersection of theory and practice, an imperative that is perhaps most evident in the statement that Te Papa is 'founded on the principles of unified collections, the narratives of culture and place, the idea of forum, the bicultural partnership between Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti, and the multidisciplinary approach to delivering a national museum for diverse audiences'.[78] In addition to this rhetorical interdisciplinarity, Te Papa promotes collaborative research into and development of exhibitions and public programs, which it sees as a way to develop or provoke conversation across public, private and governmental spheres. Te Papa's recently reorganised National Services Te Paerangi Unit is perceived as central to achieving this goal.

The primary challenge for each of these institutions now is to consolidate or further expand, contest or examine the new civics that are emerging for contemporary museums out of the range of new practices they are exploring. Consequently, they are presenting their research objective as closely related to the core commitment to provide accessible and representative experiences that are both nationally specific and socially inclusive. These aims are illustrated most clearly in their strategic plans and statements of vision and intent, so that Museum Victoria, for instance, focuses on community access and the language of diversity (which it seeks to bridge by developing 'strategic partnerships' consistent with its claims to be a networked institution).[79] The National Museum of Australia's vision promotes 'a recognised world class museum exploring Australia's past, illuminating the present, imagining the future' as an outcome that is reliant on its mission to 'promote an understanding of Australia's history and an awareness of future possibilities by: developing, preserving and exhibiting a significant collection; taking a leadership role in research and scholarship; and engaging and providing access for audiences nationally and internationally delivering innovative programs'.[80] According to Te Papa's vision, the museum is 'a forum for the nation to present, explore and preserve the heritage of its cultures and knowledge of the natural environment in order to better understand and treasure the past, enrich the present, and meet the challenges of the future'.[81]

Despite being expressed in the corporate language of strategic plans and annual reports, this is not research within museums' 'own terms of reference' (as critiqued by Macdonald), but research that is informed by Miller and Yúdice's concerns over citizenship and debates about ethico-aesthetic exercises. Museums are developing and expanding their research programs as one component of an approach that is connected to attempts to develop new audiences by applying social inclusion strategies to internal activities including collection development and exhibition development and design.[82] Second, they employ outreach strategies to connect the museum meaningfully to the priorities of social and public life. The privileging of outward-focused research that is responsive to communities and developed in accord with government policies of inclusion, well-being and biculturalism (in the New Zealand context) can be immediately recognised in Te Papa's mission to develop 'scholarship drawing on systems of knowledge and understanding including Matauranga Maori' (Maori knowledge systems). As in the past, the link between staff research and expertise and the public (or community access, participation, agency) is mediated by education on the one hand, and by the museum (as an institution) on the other. Rather than representing a backlash against the new museology, this renewed reflection and critique of the theory-led practices of the recent past reflects the fears and realities of an increasingly conservative, post 9/11 world. Instead of reprising a sentimental past, museums have in many cases responded to world politics and the contemporary culture wars by reasserting a renewed dedication to rigour, truth and objectivity. However, rather than simply accepting the metanarrative categories of the past, these terms are now valued for their flaws, and for the potential these yield to build our understandings about plurality and diversity, particularly in relation to the events and people that make up and have been excluded from a multitude of national stories.

Although I am opening room for this discussion in the last stages of this essay, it is necessary for us to ask how and why the National Museum of Australia and Te Papa, for instance, have attempted to reconfigure their relationships of authority, knowledge and power in respect of imperatives towards cultural diversity and issues including community participation and representation. This line of questioning requires new ways of thinking about the interpretation of public spaces (that are also key sites of nation) and the experiences they offer. It requires an examination of museums in the global context of Indigenous rights and debates over culture that have followed a worldwide neoliberal turn. Moreover, this study must be extended to include consideration of the ideal museum as cultural centre, public forum or contact zone that is generated and sustained by its entangled engagements and exchanges with a general national polity. This project would seek to draw attention back to the form, practice and definition of the culture that is consciously and politically utilised by these institutions. The study would involve consideration of cultures of continuity and change, as well as cultures that have been translated, stolen, repatriated, updated, or moved. Ultimately, such a study would seek to evaluate these not-so-new museums against their discourse and to see how their opening objectives — of attaining an inclusive and open, consultative and collaborative, demotic institution — have been developed, expanded, challenged or replaced over their inaugural decade.

The relationships between museums (as sites of imagination) and the imagined publics they attract, entertain and educate have historically been seen as equally nebulous and varied as the idea of the museum itself. While Paula Findlen has shown that the term 'museum' became a metaphor for the collection and display of knowledge before it became identified with a physical location,[83] Andre Malraux celebrated the possibility of the museum without walls. This concept has since been replayed in a series of high profile contexts, including in Rosalind Krauss's contention that the musée imaginaire provides evidence for the phenomenal authority of speech activity as demonstrating the 'Anglo-Saxon desire for language to construct a stage on which things — even ideas — will happen'.[84] In making this point, Krauss argued that contemporary museums and their effects are often constructed primarily through rhetoric and speech activity, and only secondly through structural form. This point has been picked up most recently by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC, which refers to the outreach and community development programs of its Community Services Program as both the NMAI's 'Fourth Museum', and its museum without walls.[85] The last couple of decades have also seen a renewal of interest in the concept of the Habermasian public sphere, which exists principally as an imagined concept of possibility.[86] This has been proposed by a variety of museums seeking practices that are more inclusive to their diverse publics, and in the case of the NMAI, founding director W Richard West Jr claimed well before the museum opened that it 'has the capacity for becoming a larger social and civil space, a national and international forum ... regarding Native peoples and cultures and their broad and deep experience, past and present'.[87] As detailed engagements with the NMAI and other museums show, these imaginary spaces have concrete implications and are associated with material resolutions.[88] The 'imaginary turn' often occurs in response to concerns about globalisation, cultural economics and museums — as epitomised by the corporatisation and expansionism often associated with Thomas Krens's aspirations for a 'Global Guggenheim' industry (not to mention the cultural politics associated with attempts to normalise the anti-repatriation practices at the centre of recent debates about 'universal' museums).[89]

In this paper I have drawn both on the volumes under review and other sources to indicate that the global (and the imaginary) is constituted by a variety of real, concrete sociopolitical contexts, pretexts and lives that contribute to and are represented by museums worldwide. Despite their attention to a global and historical focus that is comparative and wide-ranging in scope, it is interesting that only a couple of these anthologies pay attention to the areas of social and local partnerships and community development and the associated tendencies in museology that have arisen, particularly in French speaking countries in the last few decades — in trends exemplified by the ecomuseum — in regional France, as well as in Vietnam, New Caledonia and in even well-established (canonised) metropolitan examples such as the Centre Georges Pompidou. Indeed, I agree with Philippe Dubé's argument that 'the role of museums as social actors, small and large, deserves to be presented in an anthology that strives for eloquence in diverse contexts',[90] and with Eilean Hooper-Greenhill's call for anthologies to be more receptive to the practices of museums funded at the local government level that 'struggle to compete for resources with swimming pools, parks, cemeteries and other local amenities'.[91] Greater integration of such practices may lead to a more inclusive approach and to further discussion about the relationship between 'social responsibility' and government funding. It may also change the way we think about museums and how we analyse their ongoing attention to 'education' and 'outreach', how we understand the recent return to research (and how we rationalise this turn against diverse histories of people and institutions), and how we demonstrate the changes that the framing discourses of museum studies undergo in relation to shifting interests and priority areas of public policy, national politics and global economics.

This paper has been independently peer-reviewed.