History Museums, Heritage and Visitors
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This paper will address some of the historical and recent developments of a troubled exhibitionary and relational history involving African objects, images, and communities in Toronto, Canada. In 1989, the exhibition “Into the Heart of Africa,” meant to critically explore the colonial premises of museum collecting in Africa, generated harsh controversy that altered the life of many people and created a very strong fracture between the African Canadian community and the Royal Ontario Museum...
Research has painted an often-gloomy picture of the impact of the financial cuts on museums. A 2014 Museums Association (MA) survey found that 43% of respondents experienced a budget cut of more than 10% in the previous year, and 9% of respondents reduced access to sites by closing whole or parts of sites. It is possible that by 2016 national museums in England may have their funding from government cut by almost 30%. A 2013 American Alliance of Museums report found that more than 67% of U...
Until the mid-twentieth century, African Americans identified a significant omission from the mainstream American historical narrative. An entire race had been whitewashed from history, and stories of the challenges and perseverance by previous generations of African Americans were limited to small exhibitions in black colleges or oral traditions within family homes. When African American history happened to trickle into the white narrative, participants were often depicted as victims, or ...
This paper will ask what constitutes an experiential reality of the past as simulated by a living house museum and how this form of heritage simulation informs our understanding of a modern-day metropolis and its cultural and historical heritage. The paper will position living history house museums as performative spaces that function as contestations of the accepted spatial, social, and temporal norms within an urban environment and allow for a form of a “contextual departure” from the pr...
This paper will explore what Bourdieu’s framework of habitus, field and symbolic capital can offer museum and heritage visitor studies. Rather than focusing on his well-known critique of high-cultural taste for art in museums, it will discuss displays of “ordinary” and social heritage—of occupations, crafts, places, communities. Habitus suggests that visitors to such heritage sites are involved in making value judgements, not of aesthetic value but of the social identities symbolized in th...