Product Description

This book draws on in-depth case studies and an array of international examples presenting a highly original contribution of the significant role that museums can play in confronting prejudice and cross-cultural understanding.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #396941 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From the Back Cover

How, if at all, do museums shape the ways in which society understands difference?

In recent decades there has been growing international interest amongst practitioners, academics and policy makers, in the role that museums might play in confronting prejudice and promoting cross-cultural understanding. A small but growing number of museums articulate, as their primary purpose, the promotion of human rights and seek to engender support among audiences for notions of equality and social justice. Moreover, museums in many parts of the world are increasingly expected to construct exhibitions which represent, in more equitable ways, the culturally pluralist societies, within which they operate, accommodating and engaging with differences on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, disability, sexuality and so on. Despite the ubiquity of these trends, there is nevertheless limited understanding of the social effects, and attendant political consequences, of these purposive representational strategies.

Richard Sandell combines interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives with in-depth empirical investigation to address a number of timely questions. How do audiences engage with and respond to exhibitions designed to contest, subvert and reconfigure prejudiced conceptions of different social groups? To what extent can museums be understood to shape, not simply reflect, normative understandings of difference, acceptability and tolerance? What are the challenges for museums which attempt to engage audiences in debating morally charged and contested contemporary social issues and how might these be addressed?

Drawing on in-depth case studies and a range of international examples, Sandell argues that museums frame, inform and enable the conversations which audiences and society more broadly, have about difference and highlights the moral and political challenges, opportunities and responsibilities which accompany these constitutive qualities.

About the Author
University of Leicester, UK