museum and knowledge politics

The third item on my list of ideal-typical reasons why museums want to bring art and science together is that art is a great cross-disciplinary integrator. The argument goes like this: As culturally established factories for the production of meaning in the knowledge society, the humanities have a strong disciplinary function. In other words, our research practices […]

As I wrote in the last post, our co-operation with the Danish Museum of Art and Design in 2004 was the founding rationale for our pilgrimage into art, design and science. Then things went rapidly. In 2006 we engaged Canadian-British artist-curator Martha Fleming to help us organise a workshop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum […]

Why has art and aesthetics then entered the science, technology and medicine (STM) museum sector? This was not the case 15 or 20 years ago. What has happened in the last two decades? I will not attempt to give any historical, sociological or political explanations for the flow of art and aesthetics into STM-museums; that’s […]

Museums are a significant part of the global science learning and experience economy. There are many hundreds, maybe thousands, of science, technology and medical museums and science centers around the world. The Association of Science-Technology Centers presently lists 447 institutions, but they don’t list small, regional and local museums. This STM-sector of the museum industry (let’s forget about science […]

In the middle of April I attended the annual Museums and the Web conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. It was 5 days of highly interesting sessions and I got back home loaded with information and inspiration that should hopefully be put into work in the near future. One of the great things about […]

With a background in the history of 20th century life sciences, I didn’t know much about museums when I took this job. But I’m gradually learning the tricks of the trade and must admit that almost everything about museums is quite fascinating, especially acquisitioning becuse it’s so close to research. I’m much more ignorant about the administrative and economic aspects. But there is […]

The other day I went to take a look at the Musée d’Historie de la Médecine, located on the second floor of the magnificent Université René Descartes (Paris 5) headquarter building in rue de l’École de Médecine.   I had expected yet another traditional, dull and didactical display of medical history, but got a pleasant surprise—a medical history museum in the disguise of […]

One month after the UMAC (University Museums and Collections) meeting in Manchester 16-20 September—held on the theme ‘University museums and the community’ (announced here)—there is another meeting of university museums, viz., the Universeum Network Meeting in Krakow, 16-18 October 2008 on the theme ‘University museums: diversity or/and uniformity? Creating a university museum’s image’ (website here). Both themes sound relevant, but why are […]

Emm Barnes has just summarised the ‘Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’ workshop in Manchester, Friday 7 March. Her report focuses on the relation between medical history scholarship and medical curatorship. Read it here. (For an earlier report, see here.)

I think Sniff raised some timely questions in her post last Friday about the upcoming International Conference on the Inclusive Museum (to be held in Leiden in early June)—especially what the meaning of the buzz-word ‘inclusion’ is, and why museums should be ‘inclusive’. The ‘Scope and Concerns’ page of the conference website is an intriguing programme document. As I […]

Formerly announced workshop ’Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’—held Friday 7 March at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) in Manchester—gathered over 40 scholars and curators, mainly from the UK. There were nine presentations in all. One each from Science Museum (London), Museum Boerhaave (Leiden), the Wellcome Collection (London), and the Sedgwick Museum (Cambridge), and another […]

I’ve just received an incoming link from a newly founded medical museum blog called ‘A Repository for Bottled Monsters‘, edited by Mike Rhode, chief archivist of the Otis Historical Archives which is one of collecting divisions of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in the northern suburbs of Washington DC: The title emanates from one of NMHM’s former curator-pathologists who wished to avoid […]