Met lit. opg. - Met reg. Exhibitions are never, and never have been, above politics. Rather, technologies of display and ideas about science and objectivity are mobilized to tell stories of progress, citizenship, racial and national difference. Description of the changing relationship between displays and their audience. It analyses the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive, multimedia and reflexive modes of display. Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology and industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine, and locations include the United States of America, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

Debating the practices of museums, galleries, and festivals, Exhibiting Cultures probes the often politically charged relationships among aesthetics, contexts, and implicit assumptions that govern how art and artifacts are displayed and understood. The contributors—museum directors, curators, and scholars in art history, folklore, history, and anthropology—represent a variety of stances on the role of museums and their function as intermediaries between the makers of art or artifacts and the eventual viewers.

Political yard signs are one of the most ubiquitous and conspicuous features of American political campaigns, yet they have received relatively little attention as a form of political communication or participation. In Politics on Display, Todd Makse, Scott L. Minkoff, and Anand E. Sokhey tackle this phenomenon to craft a larger argument about the politics of identity and space in contemporary America. Documenting political life in two suburban communities and a major metropolitan area, they use an unprecedented research design that leverages street-level observation of the placement of yard signs and neighborhood-specific survey research that delves into the attitudes, behavior, and social networks of residents. The authors then integrate these data into a geo-database that also includes demographic and election data. Supplemented by nationally-representative data sources, the book brings together insights from political communication, political psychology, and political geography. Against a backdrop of conflict and division, this book advances a new understanding of how citizens experience campaigns, why many still insist on airing their views in public, and what happens when social spaces become political spaces.

Museums have lengthy history, going back to the Renaissance Cabinets of Curiosity, and they are indices of changing fashions of perception insofar as the categories museum curators use to classify objects change over time. The major focus of Tyburczy s study is sexuality on display, which sets up, in turn, her investigation of the effects of museum display on the history of sexuality. Historical context for the museum is one of her themes (and how categories of normacly and perversity change over time), with another themes being the work of sex museums n redefining what sex means in the modern public sphere; she also folds in consideration of the pleasures and dangers of exhibiting marginalized sexual subjects (women, nonwhite races, LGBT individuals, and the like); last, she explores the paradox of asserting (as she does) that all museums are sex museums bodies move around and toward objects on display, they reshape the typical dances of museum-goers along with their preconscious motivations in visiting a museum. She proposes that explicit display or restagings of sexual artifacts provides new ways for approaching and understanding issues of desire, sexual identity, and sexual practices as they intersect with the history of the modern museum and with sexual history during the past two centuries. Her fieldwork sites are: the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, the Museum of Sex in New York, the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, and El Museo del Sexo in Mexico City. Such institutions allow Tyburczy to show how alternative sexuality (inclusive of kink, fetish, and sadomasochistic cultures) and slavery dangerously crisscross on the surface of objects. There are plenty of cases here, in short, to keep the casual reader titillated and the erudite reader surprised."

Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture examines the politics of emotion in history museums, combining approaches and concerns from museum, heritage and memory studies, anthropology and studies of emotion. Exploring the meanings and politics of memory contests in Turkey, a site for complex negotiations of identity, the book asks what it means for museums to charge the past with political agendas through spectacular, emotive representations. Providing an in-depth examination of emotional practice in two Turkish museums that present contrasting representations of the national past, the book analyses relationships between memory, governmentality, identity, and emotion. The museums discussed celebrate Ottoman and Early Republican pasts, linking to geo- and party politics, people’s senses of who they are, popular memory culture, and competing national stories and identities vis-à-vis Europe and the wider world. Both museums use dramatic, emotive panoramas as key displays and the research at the heart of this book explores this seemingly anachronistic choice, and how it links with memory cultures to prompt visitors to engage imaginatively, socially, politically and morally with a particular version of the past. Although the book focuses on museums in Turkey, it uses this as a platform to address broader questions about memory culture, emotion, and identity. As such, Museums and Memory Culture should be of great interest to academics and students around the world who are engaged in the study of museums, heritage, culture, history, politics, anthropology, sociology, and the psychology of emotion.

Curating Revolution examines how Mao-era exhibitions shaped popular understandings of, and participation in, the political campaigns of China's Communist revolution.

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.

The Politics of the Superficial argues that the increasing volume of visually communicative surfaces in public life contributes to a very particular form of public imagination and political activity.

Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.