Reculturing Museums takes a unified sociocultural theoretical approach to analyze the many conflicts museums experience in the 21st century. Embracing conflict, Ash asks: What can practitioners and researchers do to create the change they want to see when old systems remain stubbornly in place? Using a unified sociocultural, cultural-historical, activity-theoretical approach to analyzing historically bound conflicts that plague museums, each chapter is organized around a central contradiction, including finances ("Who will pay for museums?"), demographic shifts ("Who will come to museums?"), the roles of narratives ("Whose story is it?"), ownership of objects ("Who owns the artifact?"), and learning and teaching ("What is learning and how can we teach equitably?"). The reculturing stance taken by Ash promotes social justice and equity, ‘making change’ first, within museums, called inreach, rather than outside the museum, called outreach; challenges existing norms; is sensitive to neoliberal and deficit ideologies; and pays attention to the structure agency dialectic. Reculturing Museums will be essential reading for academics, students, museum practitioners, educational researchers, and others who care about museums and want to ensure that all people have equal access to the activities, objects, and ideas residing in them.

In these days of an aging traditional audience, shrinking attendance, tightened budgets, increased competition, and exponential growth in new types of communication methods, America’s house museums need to take bold steps and expand their overall purpose beyond those of the traditional museum. They need not only to engage the communities surrounding them, but also to collaborate with visitors on the type and quality of experience they provide. This book is a groundbreaking manifesto that calls for the establishment of a more inclusive, visitor-centered paradigm based on the shared experience of human habitation. It draws inspiration from film, theater, public art, and urban design to transform historic house museums while providing a how-to guide for making historic house museums sustainable, through five primary themes: communicating with the surrounding community, engaging the community, re-imagining the visitor experience, celebrating the detritus of human habitation, and acknowledging the illusion of the shelter’s authenticity. Anarchist's Guide to Historic House Museums offers a wry, but informed, rule-breaking perspective from authors with years of experience and gives numerous vivid examples of both good and not-so-good practices from house museums in the U.S.

Museums and Social Responsibility examines inherent contradictions within and effecting museum practice in order to outline a museological theory of how museums are important cultural practices in themselves and how museums shape the socio-cultural dynamics of modern societies, especially our attitudes and understandings about human agency and creative potential. Museums are libraries of objects, presenting thematic justification that dominant concepts of normativity and speciality, as well as attitudes of cultural deprecation. By sorting culture into hierarchies of symbolic value, museums cloak themselves in supposed objectivity, delivered with the passion of connoisseurship and the surety of scholarly research. Ulterior motives pertaining to socio-economic class, racial and ethnic othering, and sexual subjugation, are shrouded by that false appearance of objectivity. This book highlights how the socially responsive practitioner can challenge and subvert taken-for-granted motivations by undertaking liberatory museum work that engages subaltern narratives, engages historically disadvantage populations, and co-creates with them dialogical practices of collecting, preserving, exhibiting and interpreting. It points to examples in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, not as self-contained entities but as practices within a global web of relationships, and as microcosms that define normality and abnormality, that engage users in critical dialogue, and that influence, are conditioned by, and disrupt taken-for-granted understandings and practices of class, ethnicity, sex, gender, thinking and being. Suitable for students, researchers, and museum professionals, Museums and Social Responsibility presents a comprehensive argument and proposes critical, reflective processes to the practitioner, so that their museum work may more effectively engage with and change their societies and the world.

The Reflective Museum Practitioner explores a range of expansive and creative ways in which the concept of “reflective practice” has been applied in the informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning environments of museums and zoos. It seeks to demonstrate how such a process can inspire lifelong learning in practitioners, to the benefit of practitioners and visitors alike. Presenting six projects that employed reflective practice, the contributors examine how each project has encouraged and sustained reflection, and the outcomes thereof. The projects cover a wide range of different practitioners—including administrators, scientists, educators, and other front-line and back-room staff—who work at different junctures of their organizations. Collectively, they raise key questions about changing communities of practice in Informal Science Learning institutions. The projects and concept of “reflective practice” are fully defined and contextualized by the editors, who offer in-depth analysis, along with a cultural-historical activity theory framework, for understanding how changes in museum practice unfold in an institutional context. The Reflective Museum Practitioner offers museum professionals insight into “reflective practice,” as practiced by other institutions in their sector, providing practical examples that can be adapted to their needs. It will also be of interest to scholars and students focusing on science museums, or professional practice development in museums.

Public Gardens and Livable Cities changes the paradigm for how we conceive of the role of urban public gardens. Donald A. Rakow, Meghan Z. Gough, and Sharon A. Lee advocate for public gardens as community outreach agents that can, and should, partner with local organizations to support positive local agendas. Safe neighborhoods, quality science education, access to fresh and healthy foods, substantial training opportunities, and environmental health are the key initiative areas the authors explore as they highlight model successes and instructive failures that can guide future practices. Public Gardens and Livable Cities uses a prescriptive approach to synthesize a range of public, private, and nonprofit initiatives from municipalities throughout the country. In doing so, the authors examine the initiatives from a practical perspective to identify how they were implemented, their sustainability, the obstacles they encountered, the impact of the initiatives on their populations, and how they dealt with the communities' underlying social problems. By emphasizing the knowledge and skills that public gardens can bring to partnerships seeking to improve the quality of life in cities, this book offers a deeper understanding of the urban public garden as a key resource for sustainable community development.

Creating Digital Exhibits for Cultural Institutions will show you how to create digital exhibits and experiences for your users that will be informative, accessible and engaging. Illustrated with real-world examples of digital exhibits from a range of GLAMs, the book addresses the many analytical aspects and practical considerations involved in the creation of such exhibits. It will support you as you go about: analyzing content to find hidden themes, applying principles from the museum exhibit literature, placing your content within internal and external information ecosystems, selecting exhibit software, and finding ways to recognize and use your own creativity. Demonstrating that an exhibit provides a useful and creative connecting point where your content, your organization, and your audience can meet, the book also demonstrates that such exhibits can provide a way to revisit difficult and painful material in a way that includes frank and enlightened analyses of issues such as racism, colonialism, sexism, class, and LGBTQI+ issues. Creating Digital Exhibits for Cultural Institutions is an essential resource for librarians, archivists, and other cultural heritage professionals who want to promote their institution’s digital content to the widest possible audience. Academics and students working in the fields of library and information science, museum studies and digital humanities will also find much to interest them within the pages of this book.

This edited volume brings together an international perspective of 22 diverse learning theories applied to a range of informal science learning environments. The book is divided into 7 sections: community of practice, critical theory, identity theory, sociocultural, socioscientific, and social entrepreneurship, systems theory, and theory development. The chapters present how researchers from diverse backgrounds and cultures use theories in their work and how these may be applied as theoretical frameworks for future research. The chapters bridge theory and practice and collectively address a wide range of ages (children-adults) and contexts. The book is written to engage a broad audience of researchers in universities and museums, while appealing to the growing number of researchers and educators who recognize the importance of informal learning to the development of environmental and scientific literacy. It is essential reading for inexperienced researchers and those seeking new theoretical perspectives.