Connecting Museums

Connecting Museums explores the boundaries of museums and how external relationships are affected by internal commitments, structures and traditions. Focusing on museums' relationship with heath, inclusion, and community, the book provides a detailed assessment of the alliances between museums and other stakeholders in recent years. With contributions from practitioners and established and early-career academics, this volume explore the ideas and practices through which museums are seeking to move beyond what might be called one-off contributions to society, to reach places where the museum is dynamic and facilitates self-generation and renewal, where it can become not just a provider of a cultural service, but an active participant in the rehabilitation of social trust and democratic participation. The contributors to this volume provide conceptual critiques and clarification of a number of key ideas which form the basis of the ethics of museum legitimacy, as well as a number of reports from the front line about the experience of trying to renew museums as more valuable and more relevant institutions. Providing internal and external perspectives, Connecting Museums presents a mix of applied and theoretical understandings of the changing roles of museums today. As such, the book should be of interest to academics, researchers and students working in the broad fields of museum and heritage studies, material culture, and arts and museum management.

Mark O'Neill is former Head of Glasgow Museums. He is now an independent researcher and consultant, an Associate Professor, College of Arts, Glasgow University and Chair of the Jury of the European Museum of the Year Award. Glenn Hooper is a Researcher in Heritage and Tourism at Glasgow Caledonian University and Editor of Heritage and Tourism in Britain and Ireland (Routledge), and Heritage at the Interface (Florida).

1. A Social Museum by Design; 2. Notes from the Frontline: Partnerships in Museums; 3. The Social Role of Museums: from Social Inclusion to Health and Wellbeing; 4. Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales and the journey towards Cultural Democracy; 5. Breaking out of the museum core: Conservation as participatory ontology and systemic action inquiry; 6. Thinking through Museums and Health in Glasgow; 7. Partnership for Health: the role of cultural and national assets in Public Health; 8. Transforming Health, Museums and the Civic Imagination; 9. ''Who Me?': the individual experience in Participative and Collaborative Projects; 10. Coalville Heroes; 11. On a Hungry Hill: Museology and Community on the Beara Peninsula; 12. ''Only Connect': the Heritage and Emotional Politics of show-casing the Suffering Migrant; 13. The Changing Shape of Museums in an increasingly Digital World; 14. Material Presence and Virtual Representation: the place of the Museum in a Globalised World; 15. Curating Democratic and Civic Engagement