ABSTRACT

This is a multi-disciplinary study that adopts an innovative and original approach to a highly topical question, that of meaning-making in museums, focusing its attention on pedagogy and visual culture.

This work explores such questions as:

  • How and why is it that museums select and arrange artefacts, shape knowledge, construct a view?
  • How do museums produce values?
  • How do active audiences make meaning from what they experience in museums?

This stimulating book provokes debate and discussion on these topics and puts forward the idea of a new museum - the post-museum, which will challenge the familiar modernist museum.  A must for students and professionals in the field.

chapter 1|22 pages

Culture and meaning in the museum

chapter 2|26 pages

Picturing the ancestors and imag(in)ing the nation

The collections of the first decade of the National Portrait Gallery, London

chapter 4|27 pages

Words and things

Constructing narratives, constructing the self

chapter 5|21 pages

Objects and interpretive processes

chapter 6|27 pages

Exhibitions and interpretation

Museum pedagogy and cultural change

chapter 7|12 pages

The rebirth of the museum