Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age

Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age explores online museums as sites of contemporary cultural diplomacy. Building on scholarship that highlights how museums can constitute and regulate citizens, construct national communities, and project messages across borders, the book explores the political powers of museums in their online spaces. Demonstrating that digital media allow museums to reach far beyond their physical locations, Grincheva investigates whether online audiences are given the tools to co-curate museums and their collections to establish new pathways for international cultural relations, exchange and, potentially, diplomacy. Evaluating the online capacities of museums to exert cultural impacts, the book illuminates how online museum narratives shape audience perceptions and redefine their cultural attitudes and identities. Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age will be of interest to academics and students teaching or taking courses on museums and heritage, communication and media, cultural studies, cultural diplomacy, international relations and digital humanities. It will also be useful to practitioners around the world who want to learn more about the effect digital museum experiences have on international audiences.

Dr. Natalia Grincheva is an internationally recognised expert in innovative forms and global trends in contemporary museology, digital diplomacy and international cultural relations. She received many prestigious international academic awards, including Fulbright (2007-2009), Quebec Fund (2011-2013), Australian Endeavour (2012-2013) and SOROS research grant (2013-2014). In 2020 she was awarded a Fellowship for her visiting research residency at the Digital Diplomacy Research Center at the University of Oxford. Her publication profile includes over 45 research articles, book chapters and reports published in prominent academic outlets. Her research focuses on the development of new computational methods to study museums and heritage sites as important players in the creative economy and soft power actors. Dr. Grincheva's professional engagements include her dedicated work for the International Fund for Cultural Diversity at UNESCO (2011) and International Federation of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity (2011-2015), her research industry placement at ACMI X creative hub at the Australian Center for the Moving Image (2017-2019) as well as service for the international Cultural Research Network (CRN) (2018-2020).

1. Introduction. When museums go global and digital: New pathways of museum diplomacy; 2. Digital museum diplomacy; 3. Failures of digital repatriation diplomacy: The Virtual Museum of the Pacific; 4. Digital heritage imperialism: "A History of the World in 100 Objects"; 5. Online power of global brands: YouTube Play; 6. Conclusion. From failures to successes: From the material past to digital futures