The forthcoming volume The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation, which I have co-edited and contributed a chapter to, is now available for pre-order from Amazon.

TOC

List of illustrations
List of contributors
Preface Sandra Dudley
1. Introduction: museums and things Sandra Dudley

Part I: Objects and their creation in the museum
Introduction Jennifer Walklate
2. Romancing the Stones: earth science objects as material culture Hannah-Lee Chalk
3. What do we know about what we know? The museum ‘register’ as museum object Geoffrey N. Swinney
4. Emblematic museum objects of national significance: in search of their multiple meanings and values Marlen Mouliou and Despina Kalessopoulou
5. Musealization processes in the realm of art  Maria Lucia de Niemeyer Matheus Loureiro
6. Photography – museum: on posing, imageness, and the punctum Klaus Wehner

Part II Visitors’ engagements with museum objects Introduction  Jennifer Binnie
7. Things and theories: the unstable presence of exhibited objects Chris Dorsett
8. Inexperienced museum visitors and how they negotiate contemporary art. A comparative study of two visitor-driven visual art presentations Marijke Van Eeckhaut
9. Illuminating narratives: period rooms and tableaux vivants Michael Katzberg 10. Magic objects/modern objects: heroes’ house museums Linda Young
11. ‘Do not touch’ – a discussion on the problems of a limited sensory experience with objects in a gallery or museum context Helen Saunderson
12. Living objects: a theory of museological objecthood Wing Yan Vivian Ting
13. The poetic triangle of objects, people and writing creatively: using museum collections to inspire linguistic creativity and poetic understanding Nikki Clayton and Mark Goodwin
14. Location and intervention: visual practice enabling a synchronic view of artefacts and sites Shirley Chubb

Part III The uses of objects in museum representations Introduction Amy Jane Barnes
15. Spectacle and archive in two contemporary art museums in Spain Roger Sansi
16. Playing dress-up: inhabiting imagined spaces through museum objects Julia Petrov
17. Material object and immaterial collector: is there room for the donor-collector discourse in the museal space? Caroline Bergeron 18. Exhibiting absence in the museum Helen Rees Leahy
19. Arctic ‘relics’: the construction of history, memory and narratives at the National Maritime Museum Claire Warrior

Part IV Objects and difficult subjects Introduction Julia Petrov
20. Challenged pasts and the museum: the case of Ghanaian kente Malika Kraamer
21. Standardizing difference: the materiality of ethnic minorities in the museums of the Peoples’ Republic of China Marzia Varutti
22. Displaying the Communist Other: perspectives on the exhibition and interpretation of Communist visual culture Amy Jane Barnes
23. Reconsidering images: using the farm security administration photographs as objects in history exhibitions Meighen Katz
24. (Im)material practices in museums Alice Semedo
25. Heritage as pharmakon and the muses as deconstruction: – problematising curative museologies and heritage healing Beverley Butler
Afterword: A conversation with Sue Pearce Amy Jane Barnes and Jennifer Walklate