Contributors to this volume examine and illustrate struggles and collaborations among museums, festivals, tourism, and historic preservation projects and the communities they represent and serve. Essays include the role of museums in civil society, the history of African-American collections, and experiments with museum-community dialogue about the design of a multicultural society.

With contributions from key scholars in a range of disciplines, this engaging new volume explores the complex issues surrounding collaboration between museums and their communities.

Combining research that stretches across all of the social sciences and international case studies, Elizabeth Crooke here explores the dynamics of the relationship between the community and the museum. Focusing strongly on areas such as Northern Ireland, South Africa, Australia and North America to highlight the complex issues faced by museums and local groups, Crooke examines one of the museum's primary responsibilities – working with different communities and using collections to encourage people to learn about their own histories, and to understand other people's. Arguing for a much closer examination of this concept of community, and of the significance of museums to different communities, Museums and Community is a dynamic look at a relationship that has, in modern times, never been more important.

This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.

Using case studies drawn from all areas of museum studies, Museums and their Communities explores the museums as a site of representation, identity and memory, and considers how it can influence its community. Focusing on the museum as an institution, and its social and cultural setting, Sheila Watson examines how museums use their roles as informers and educators to empower, or to ignore, communities. Looking at the current debates about the role of the museum, she considers contested values in museum functions and examines provision, power, ownership, responsibility, and institutional issues. This book is of great relevance for all disciplines as it explores and questions the role of the museum in modern society.

This volume presents seventeen essays critically reflecting on the collaborative work of the contemporary ethnographic museum with diverse communities. It invites the reader to think about the roles and values of museums internationally, particularly the wide range of creative approaches that can progress dialogue and intercultural understanding in an age of migration that is marked by division and distrust. Against a troubling global background of prejudice and misunderstanding, where elections are increasingly returning right-wing governments, this timely book considers the power of an inclusive and transformative museum space, specifically the movements from static sites where knowledge is transmitted to passive audiences towards potential contact zones where diverse community voices and visibilities are raised and new knowledge(s) actively constructed.

The growth of collaboration between museums and source communities - the people from whom collections originate - is an important development in modern museum practice. This volume combines influential published research with commissioned essays on the issues, problems and lessons involved.

This book presents a critical analysis of the power and opportunity created in the implementation of community engaged practices within art museums, by looking at the networks connecting art museums to community organizations, artists and residents. The Art Museum Redefined places the interaction of art museums and urban neighbourhoods as the central focus of the study, to investigate how museums and artists collaborate with residents and local community groups. Rather than defining the community solely from the perspective of a museum looking out at its audience, the research examines the larger networks of art organizing and creative activism connected to the museum that are active across the neighbourhood. Taylor's research encompasses the grassroots efforts of local groups and their collaboration with museums and other art institutions that are extending their reach outside their physical walls and into the community. This focus on social engagement speaks to recent emphasis in cultural policy on cultural equity and inclusion, creative place-making and community engagement at neighbourhood and city-levels, and will be of interest to students, scholars and policy-makers alike.

Combining research that stretches across all of the social sciences and international case studies, Elizabeth Crooke here explores the dynamics of the relationship between the community and the museum. Focusing strongly on areas such as Northern Ireland, South Africa, Australia and North America to highlight the complex issues faced by museums and local groups, Crooke examines one of the museum's primary responsibilities – working with different communities and using collections to encourage people to learn about their own histories, and to understand other people's. Arguing for a much closer examination of this concept of community, and of the significance of museums to different communities, Museums and Community is a dynamic look at a relationship that has, in modern times, never been more important.