Full Description
In this revised and updated translation of Das Radikaldemokratische Museum, Sternfeld offers a timely critique of museums as they exist today and instead calls for museums to be reconceptualised as contested spaces for debate and new forms of political activism.
Drawing upon approaches from museum studies, education and critical theory, this volume challenges past and present exhibitions and reconsiders how museum spaces can be re-appropriated in order to produce critical knowledge, rethink education, and challenge collections. In doing so, Sternfeld envisages the radical democratic museum as a space that allows us to grapple with the past, negotiate what this means for the present, and to imagine a future that is more than simply an extension of the present.
This provocative and timely book will be relevant to scholars, students and practitioners with interests in museums, critical heritage studies, social justice and political movements.
Contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction: How Do We Imagine a Museum of the Future?; I Inside the Post-Representational Museum; II Playing by the Rules of the Game! Participation in the Post-Representational Museum; III Deprovincialising the Museum. What would a Museum be if it were not a Western Concept?; IV Doesn't Quite Fit. The Unspectacular Resistance of Material; V The Object Effect. What is the Thing about Materials in Exhibitions?; VI Contested Memories. Memorials as Contact Zones; VII Where does Mediation stand? An Introduction that Confronts its Scepticism; VIII Sailing. In Search of Radical Education, Don't Take the Next Turn; IX "Give her the tools, she will know what to do with them!" How Can We Learn Something that Doesn't Yet Exist; X Showing Each Other Something that Does Not Exist Yet. Thoughts on the Representation Practice of Büro trafo.K; XI Why Exhibit at all? An Answer from the Year 2030; Index.
