{"title":"A small, old, and slightly rough mirror: Encountering traumatic experiences in Nanjing Museum of the Site of Lijixiang Comfort Stations","authors":"Hongfang Sun, Guangjian Liu, Jianqiang Yan","doi":"10.1111/cura.12654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12654","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper investigates how traumatic events are curated and narrated in the Nanjing Museum of the Site of Lijixiang Comfort Stations. Drawing on narrative therapy in museology, the paper offers a perspective for understanding and interpreting the narrative practice in public space. It follows the reconstruction of narrative structures through a variety of viewpoints, including spatial narratives, exhibition narratives, public engagement in response to traumatic memories, and the logical and emotional encounters in museums. Visitors' learning of traumatic experiences in the museum shows a kind of indissoluble connection, a type of empathetic mutual understanding, a kind of community engagement that contributed to the recovery, and a kind of responsibility to prevent such traumatic events from happening again.</p>","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"67 4","pages":"885-908"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142724241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The body remembers: Legacies of chattel slavery hauntings in South Africa and the United States","authors":"Bonita Bennett, Doris Ash","doi":"10.1111/cura.12650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12650","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As museum scholars and practitioners coming from quite different geographies and practicalities, we have chosen to focus on chattel slavery as an extreme form of incarceration in South Africa and the United States. In this essay we reflect on its legacies, referencing physical, psychological as well as cultural dimensions. We hold a mirror to power structures infected by commodification and violence as we examine the stories and tools of enslavement and refer particularly to the covert ways in which resistance was enacted. We bring a “sites of conscience” framework into the dialogue, believing that sites can be transformative tools for forging broader understandings both about what took place at these sites, and why it matters in the present. Our methods of engagement include mutual interviewing, based partially on autoethnographic reflection and, significantly, our own practices within museums and communities. Because of the organic nature of our dialogue, we present it as an essay rather than as a typical academic paper.</p>","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"67 4","pages":"757-791"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142737593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Theano Moussouri, Doris Ash, Bonita Bennett, Kenneth Cohen, Anna Leshchenko
{"title":"Incarceration: Museum research and practice","authors":"Theano Moussouri, Doris Ash, Bonita Bennett, Kenneth Cohen, Anna Leshchenko","doi":"10.1111/cura.12653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12653","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This special issue considers how museums can take transformative action by interrogating and addressing issues of incarceration. The contributing authors argue that examining museum practice through the lens of incarceration can help reveal and even redress the structures and power dynamics that have generated visible and invisible types of oppressive and violent carcerality. This purpose builds on and extends the contributions museums have already made—and even have spurred—to advocate on a number of social and environmental issues, including social injustice and human rights violations. In some cases, this action has responded to societal change, while in other cases museums have taken a leadership role by anticipating needs and proposing new programs and policies. For example, certain museums have played key roles in crafting pathways for reconciliation with Indigenous communities through repatriation of artifacts, explicit recognition of human rights violations, and co-creation practices that center community voices to highlight previously silenced perspectives and worldviews. Of course, much of this work stands in contrast to—and in an effort to acknowledge—museums' colonial origins. This issue sets such an approach within a transitional justice context which aims to acknowledge, recognize, remember, and interpret acts, or periods, of human rights abuses, including genocide, displacement, disempowerment, and other types of violence and repression. To be sure, addressing these issues has been far from easy, for museum collections are steeped in colonial hierarchies of knowledge and Western epistemologies, and their operations are often funded to some significant extent by state authorities that are also responsible for carceral systems.</p><p>This issue cannot claim to be the first to draw the field's attention to incarceration. Both popular and scholarly publications have generated growing awareness of museums' opportunity and ability to expose patterns of unjust incarceration, to question the very premise of carceral punishment, as well as to break down barriers and stereotypes that have long prevented formerly incarcerated individuals from equitably participating in society. Much of this work has taken the form of exhibitions and public programming, increasingly in collaboration with incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals and their families. The goals of such projects are typically to raise awareness among general visitors of the systemic injustices of carceral systems and to communicate the humanity of incarcerated populations so that they are less stigmatized. Several former sites of incarceration have led the way in this work (Kilmainham Jail in Dublin, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, the National Justice Museum in Nottingham, UK, and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, to name a few), though a wide range of art and history museums have followed in their footsteps and expanded the compass of ways the field can ad","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"67 4","pages":"753-756"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cura.12653","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142737464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exhibiting slavery in Australia: Personal narratives and legacies","authors":"Paul Longley Arthur, Isabel Smith","doi":"10.1111/cura.12640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12640","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The history of slavery has often been located on the same continuum as that of incarceration. This article explores the development of an exhibition representing the legacies of slavery in Australia, analysing Australian and international exhibitions alongside theories of museology, historiography and memory. It begins by considering the growth of slavery memory since the latter twentieth century, and Australia's own slavery heritage. The second half of the article focuses on curatorial directions and decisions taken in the exhibition, which our research team is currently developing in partnership with the Australian National Maritime Museum as part of an Australian Research Council project. Much of the project's research to date has been biographical, investigating the lives of individual slavers and colonists to explore colonial and racial frameworks still underpinning contemporary Australia. For the exhibition, we are investigating ways of expanding the scope to represent the lives and experiences of enslaved individuals. We are also exploring the challenges of retracing past lives, the potential limits of empathy, and the politics of ownership when telling stories about the past. This includes considering community participation, the biases and silences of the archives, and the use of art in representing the past.</p>","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"67 4","pages":"793-804"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cura.12640","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142737414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Incarceration and food insecurity: Challenges and opportunities for museum interpretation","authors":"Sophie Fuggle, Laura McAtackney","doi":"10.1111/cura.12646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12646","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article focuses on the role of food interpretation in prison museums and penal heritage sites, which has been underexplored in recent critical analyses of penal tourism and heritage. The authors argue that food is a fundamental part of the lived experience of confinement and detention and lends itself to multiple forms of interpretation and programming activities. Following an overview of existing literature on food insecurity and the different research methods available in recounting stories about food and food insecurity, the article is divided into three main sections. These explore the connections between the built heritage of prisons and the wider landscape, personal and political experiences of hunger, and the potential of art and creativity in negotiating food insecurity. The article concludes with reflections on how food narratives can be further used by prison museums to engage with contemporary issues of social justice, sustainability, decoloniality, and abolition.</p>","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"67 4","pages":"865-884"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cura.12646","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142737516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bad Bridget—An unexplored aspect of the Irish migration story","authors":"Victoria Millar","doi":"10.1111/cura.12645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12645","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines how museums can address and raise awareness of histories of incarceration through a case study—the <i>Bad Bridget</i> exhibition, which opened at the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, Northern Ireland, in April 2022. Originating as an academic research project (2015–2019) led by Dr Leanne McCormick (Ulster University) and Dr Elaine Farrell (Queen's University Belfast), it tells the stories of women who left Ireland for North America between 1838 and 1918 and ended up in trouble with the authorities for one reason or another. A unique mix of sights, sounds, and smells, further enhanced by first-person narration, is used within the exhibition to encourage visitors to emotionally engage with the experiences of these women. For much of the nineteenth century, Irish-born migrants were the biggest group in American prisons, and there were disproportionate numbers of Irish girls and women in the justice system, court, and prison (Farrell & McCormick, <i>‘Bad Bridgets’: The criminal and deviant Irish women convicted in America</i>. Irish Times, 2019). <i>Bad Bridget</i> has provided us with a platform to reveal this previously unexplored aspect of the Irish migration story at the museum, contrary to the “American Dream.”</p>","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"67 4","pages":"835-843"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142737519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Holders of battered memories: Exploring suitcases as museum metaphors for travel, exile, and incarceration","authors":"Elizabeth Carnegie, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz","doi":"10.1111/cura.12642","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cura.12642","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article we consider suitcases: ubiquitous objects in museum exhibitions used to signify incarceration as well as involuntary or forced migration. Building on fieldwork from museums and public spaces, we consider how suitcases themselves are consigned to the “attic of memory:” As museum displays or as piles of discarded remnants, offered as vestiges, as witnesses to human loss and suffering at death camps such as Auschwitz. We consider suitcases firstly as aspects of the extended self, as described in Russell Belk's work, and subsequently as symbolic object figuring imprisonment and mobility in museum exhibitions. We present three different such instances: a suitcase full of personal belongings presented to a museum, a set of concrete facsimile suitcases symbolizing forced migration, and a display of suitcases representing individual stories of confinement and migration. Although some of the life stories in the latter exhibition are presented with happy endings, by and large the museum displays featuring suitcases tell of forced movement and forced immobility. This tension animates our analysis, as we explore the double signification of suitcases as markers of mobility, but also of immobility and imprisonment, as well as the intrusive gaze of the state or other voyeur (including the museum visitor). A suitcase is, thus, not just an extension of the self but represents the lost body, for which the museum becomes the final, very public resting place. It becomes and remains an important memory device, even as its very ubiquity threatens to banalize its meaning into a one-dimensional shortcut.</p>","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"67 4","pages":"821-834"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cura.12642","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141801173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Invisible victims: How children's museums are strengthening families through partnerships with correctional facilities","authors":"Violet Hott, Adrienne Testa, Leslie Bushara","doi":"10.1111/cura.12641","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cura.12641","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A large and increasing number of children in the United States are systematically rendered invisible due to the effects of parental incarceration, forced to navigate a correctional system that does not often take their particular needs into account. This trauma can put children at risk of long-term developmental consequences that can be lasting across generations. Two children's museums, among others, are developing unique partnerships to mitigate this negative impact. The Children's Museum of Manhattan has an ongoing partnership with the NYC Department of Correction to reunite incarcerated parents at Rikers Island with their children for an afternoon at the Museum. Hands On Children's Museum in Olympia, Washington, is partnering with the Washington Department of Corrections to redesign the children's area of visiting rooms in three correctional facilities. Anecdotal evidence of strengthened parent–child bonds and improved behavior of parents during incarceration show that early indications of both efforts are positive.</p>","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"67 4","pages":"845-863"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141798788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Objects of “imprisonment”: Diasporic museum collections on ethnographic display","authors":"Bruno Brulon Soares","doi":"10.1111/cura.12648","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cura.12648","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The article reflects on the place and the narratives in which collections of the Afro-Brazilian diaspora are inscribed in the context of ethnographic museums in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Presenting a brief sociohistorical analysis of two collections, one in the Civil Police Museum and the other in the Édison Carneiro Folklore Museum, it demonstrates how different regimes of knowledge are used to “imprison” objects of faith as museum objects in the eyes of the police or in those of ethnographers. “Incarcerated” in museums, these collections have been kept by state institutions that frame them either as testimonies of offenses to the public order, or as objects of folklore, religious artifacts disconnected from terreiros. Finally, recurring to a theoretical framework of nonduality to provoke museum's stable categories, the article considers the current transformative role of museums in the “liberation” of a diasporic heritage, by proposing dialogue and collaboration as important elements in the liminal work of musealization. Ultimately, what is at stake in the case of Afro-Brazilian sacred materials kept in museums is the ability of objects disassociated from their ritual context to transmit the sacred in the museum environment.</p>","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"67 4","pages":"805-820"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cura.12648","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141801796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Eardley, Vanessa E. Jones, Lindsay Bywood, Hannah Thompson, Deborah Husbands
{"title":"The W‐ICAD model: Redefining museum access through the Workshop for Inclusive Co‐created Audio Description","authors":"A. Eardley, Vanessa E. Jones, Lindsay Bywood, Hannah Thompson, Deborah Husbands","doi":"10.1111/cura.12649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12649","url":null,"abstract":"This research describes the development of the Workshop for Inclusive Co‐created Audio Description (W‐ICAD) model. Research from psychology and neuroscience explains why the assumption that vision is necessarily sufficient to be able to engage with collections is problematic, and why inclusive museum audio description (AD) (referred to as visual or verbal description in the United States) might begin to provide a solution to this problem. At the same time, the growing recognition of the need to diversify voices and narratives within the international museum sector demands a re‐imagining of how museum AD is created, and who creates it. Underpinned by the axioms of Blindness Gain and created through an iterative action research process by a joint UK‐US team of researchers and museum professionals, in collaboration with a broader team of co‐creators, the W‐ICAD model provides museums and the cultural sector with a tool for producing co‐created AD, created by blind, partially blind and sighted individuals for use in museums by blind, partially blind or sighted audiences. The applications for this model are discussed.","PeriodicalId":10791,"journal":{"name":"Curator: The Museum Journal","volume":"115 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141802114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}