Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with the premise that museological practice is constructed, changing, and open to radical rethinking. It explores the tension between the opening up of interpretation in museums and the continued hierarchisation of ways of knowing and being, between, inclusion and exclusion, diversity and uniformity. Moving beyond the kinds of approaches offered by social inclusion and/or human rights frameworks, the book highlights a ‘queering’ of contemporary museum practices, the often invisiblised assumptions that inform them, and the social and political effects they produce. One of the most fraught issues in contemporary museological practice and scholarship is community engagement, in particular, the question of how to enable a repositioning of visitors from “users and choosers to makers and shapers” in order to trouble established relations of power and privilege.