ABSTRACT
This book picks up directly from Museums and Social Activism (Message 2014) and ‘Contentious Politics and Museums as Contact Zones’ (Message 2015), but whereas that work focused on what museums do and how 36they react and contribute to political activism and social change, this book explores the theoretical context that frames the way writing about these activities occurs. The earlier work took a primarily museological/historical/anthropological case study approach to identifying (Message 2014) and then articulating the interdisciplinary value (Message 2015) of the relationship between culture (museums), politics, and the social reform movements that have agitated and affected both. In contrast, the focus of this small book is on the intellectual context and recent disciplinary history of analyzing museum writing and museum practice. I also gesture at times to the aligned recent history of intellectual activism (although I cannot do justice to this rich activity and its history in the space provided). My main purpose in this work is to build on the case studies and conundrums raised by the earlier work to analyze the practice of thinking and writing about museum scholarship as distinct from the practice of thinking and writing about museums. It does not directly address instances of curatorial activism (which is the subject of Message 2014; Message 2015, as well as my two forthcoming volumes; for analysis of contemporary art curatorship and/as activism, see Bishop 2013; Smith 2015) or aim to give advice about how museums might become more activist institutions but attempts to articulate concepts and techniques appropriate for progressing social and political change through a practice of cultural and disciplinary critique relevant to museums in this second half of the twenty-first century. The Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge is, in short, an attempt to motivate disciplinary thinking/museum studies anew, to reimagine writing (about museums) as an activity/place where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting can be produced, and to theorize this process as a form of protest against disciplinary stagnation. 1
