The Re/theorisation of Heritage Studies. Association of Critical Heritage Studies Inaugural
Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 5-8, 2012
Proposal for a panel
Peter Aronsson/Kylie Message
Critical research and the quest for policy relevance: the case of national museums
Museums as other forms of institutionally acknowledged cultural heritage negotiate truth
claims by connecting scientific, political and social realms of logics. Academic research
defines itself in terms of autonomy and critical distance to political influences. Research is
however often funded by political bodies and cultural research has traditionally been a
backbone of reproducing nationalism and the order of things. The critique of this from within
cultural research has led to new positions and re-evaluation of these roles. Balancing the need
for autonomy and the quest for relevance is today again more relevant because of the double
threat to cultural research from academic and societal marginalization and instrumentalization
for new political goals and a cultural economy. This panel will discuss the dilemmas and
possibilities created in the intermission between research and politically formulated hopes and
demands for policy relevance to museums and researchers.
Panel:
Peter Aronsson
Kylie Message
Katty Hauptman?
Jakob Ingemann Parby
Moderator: ?
Peter Aronsson
Feeding a European ideological agenda or answering legitimate demands to public access?
Managing demands on policy relevance in critical museum research
There is general increase on demand for research to be useful. This is more pronounced in the
Eruopean funding through the frame-work programme than in traditional academic research.
The tendency is however towards both specific calls driven by policy goals, and more diverse
demand to formulate and communicate what is possibly relevant knowledge to various
stakeholders.
The point of departure for this contribution is work with a large EC funded project on national
museums, EuNaMus (www.eunamu.eu), where research is pursued on the power of national
museums to negotiate demands to support political goals and uphold scientific standards
related to the making of the very structures of the state and nation it relates to. Furthermore
the funder demand research to identify stakeholder, communication strategies and the
formulation of policy relevant results and recommendation. The paper will problematize and
discuss the ways critical research can respond to these demands.
Katty Hauptman
Gender politics in museums
Swedish initiatives in an international setting
Kylie Message
The utility of crisis: Re-sharpening museum and heritage studies through the politics of
culture
This paper addresses the role of crisis in museological development by bringing together an
investigation of the processes of museological transformation, the parallel development of
museum studies, and a case study of the social and curatorial activism that occurred at and in
relation to the National Museum of American History in the 1960s and 1970s civil rights era. I
present this case study to argue that crisis is never far away from national museums, and that
recognition of the impact of continuing crises – and the agency of various players including
museum ‘insiders’ as well as social and political activists – might enable the creation of new
pathways for understanding the future of the field. My presentation will suggest that analysis of a
period of crisis might lead to an improved understanding of the benefits of crisis for disciplinary
renewal because crisis is a process of transformation where an old system can no longer be
maintained, and although it can manifest unexpected or threatening symptoms, it fundamentally
indicates a need for systemic change.
The broader context for this paper is an analysis of the relationship between crisis, cultural
production, and disciplinary reflexivity that recognizes that crises, and broadly-defined cultures of
crisis, transform the world that we inhabit and affect our attempts to make sense of our
experiences. Criticism and crisis are constantly present for heritage sites and museums, and are
often exemplified in the case of national museums, which occupy an interface between politics,
the private sector, communities and public policy-makers. National museums have, since the
1960s, increasingly recognized this role, and the consequent obligations of being relevant to the
community, part of the community, and attentive to representing community concerns. Museum
studies also emerged from this dynamic period, as a field of research that sought to respond to the
increasing professionalization of museum practice, and an acceleration of academic interest in the
work of museums and their relationships to governments, the broader heritage sector, and other
stakeholders. However, while museum studies and national museums are both, obviously,
concerned with the role of museums in society, no research has successfully demonstrated exactly
how and why museum practice, cultural theory and public policy ideals developed in such a
mutually productive way in the 1960s.
AUTHOR
Dr Kylie Message is Associate Professor in the School of Archeology and Anthropology and
Associate Dean (Research Training) in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian
National University. Bio: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/message-kr, Contact:
Kylie.Message@anu.edu.au
Negotiating identity or constructing consensus? Immigration at display at Museum of
Copenhagen
Jakob Ingemann Parby, curator at the museum and PhD Fellow at University of Roskilde
My paper will investigate the deconstruction and reconstruction of immigrant identities in the
exhibition Becoming a Copenhagener, that opened at the museum of Copenhagen in
November 2010. In setting up the exhibition, the museum wanted to give the contemporary
debate on immigration a historical perspective within an urban framework, but also reframe
the dominant discursive categorization of immigrants as the cultural, national and religious
Other subject to processes of acculturation by the host society. The perceived difference
between immigrants and natives has led to a reinvigoration of otherwise fading notions of
national identity on one hand and to attempts to embrace the idea of an emerging
multicultural society on the other. Both of these positions, however, tend to maintain
exclusive and essentialized perceptions of culture and identity.
Although there has been a focus within the Danish cultural institutions in recent years on
creating inclusive practices and empowering marginalized groups and individuals, most
attempts to include first- and second-generation migrants as stakeholders in museums have
been largely unsuccessful outside the educational sector. The exhibition, among other things,
was an attempt to address this failure of inclusion, which is essentially a failure of democracy,
if we concede that museums constitute important platforms for dialogical and participatory
practices in society. By moving away from the notions of the nation state and the nation-state
“container” as the premise for analyzing and discussing migration, the museum attempted to
deconstruct and reconstruct notions of migration and identity claiming that in the context of
the city of Copenhagen (and in fact in the context of most cities in the world) migration and
mobility has both contemporarily and historically been the norm rather than the opposite and
that this has created a situation in which what it means to be and to become a Copenhagener
in all its multiple meanings has been subject to constant negotiation. Rather than the national
and multicultural concepts of identity, whether institutionalized or popular, that locates and
highlights specific virtues and practices as defining very clearly demarcated cultural
identities, the exhibition instead makes a case for a more fluid, postmodern, processual idea of
identity that includes hybridization, interculturalism and cosmopolization in past and present
society. This not only transforms the perception of the contemporary city, but also transforms
the interpretations of the city’s historical heritage.
The paper investigates how this reinterpretation is constituted within the exhibition and how
the conceptualization of the exhibition, which was also essentially a retheoretization of
(national) cultural heritage, has played an important role in positioning the museum in
contemporary debates and transformed basic curatorial practices.