Blind spots: museology on museum research

ABSTRACT

Research is considered to be one of four fundamental museum practices, equal to collecting, preserving and display. As such, it is understood to provide the basis for many other activities carried out in museums. Yet research remains an ambiguous component of museum practice, sometimes entirely invisible to the public eye. Moreover, it remains a neglected topic in museology, with only a few publications on the subject since its disciplinary reinvention at the turn of the ’90s. In this article, I explore museological strands towards research in museums and identify gaps in the literature. By carving out a space for a critical analysis of museum research within contemporary museology, my aim is to explore the place of museum research within the wider hierarchy of science. By doing so, I take an epistemological approach to museums as public institutions in the borderland between science and culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum research
• knowledge production
• epistemology
• science hierarchy
• alternative research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ólöf Gerður Sigfúsdóttir is a PhD candidate at the University of Iceland.

ORCID

Ólöf Gerður Sigfúsdóttir http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1647-9784

Notes

1 The reformation of museology into new museology has generated a number of core anthologies and monographs. Among the most influential are Anderson 2012; Bennett 1995, 2018; Duncan 1995; Hooper-Greenhill 2000; Levin 2010; Macdonald 2007, 2011; Macdonald and Fyfe 1996; Marstine 2006, 2011; Vergo 1989; Watson 2001; Witcomb 2003. These core texts unveil the socio-political and ethical complexities and challenges of museum activity, but with very limited attention to research as one of the fundamental components of museum practice.

2 Among major studies in material and visual culture that have informed contemporary museology are, e.g., Appadurai 1986; Bennett 2010; Clifford 1988; Coombes 1994; Errington 1998; Gell 1998; Gosden and Knowles 2001; Karp and Lavine 1991; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Marcus and Myers 1995; Miller 2005; Mirzoeff 1999; Myers 2008; Pearce 1995; Phillips and Steiner 1999; Pratt 1992; Price 1989; Taylor 1994; Thomas 1991.

3 International conferences with museum research as the main theme are sporadic. A search over the last 15 years brings up only a few conference events with documentation and proceedings available post-event: The Museum Research Summit in Ottawa, 2005 (organised by the Canadian Museums Association), The International Symposium on Research and Museums in Stockholm, 2007 (organised by the Nationalmuseum, the Nobel Museum, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Science), and The Global Summit of Research Museums – The Transformative Potential of Research in Berlin, 2018 (organised by the Natural History Museum Berlin and Leibniz Research Museums). Local conferences with a focus on museum research are likely to have taken place at the national level where proceedings are not accessible to international audiences. Anderson (2005) points out that research has been a topic of concern among curatorial staff in museums, though little has been published on the subject.

4 See e.g. Ambrose and Paine 2018; Mason, Robinson, and Coffield 2018; Lord, Lord, and Martin 2012.

5 See e.g. Anderson 2005; Arrhenius, Cavalli-Björkman, and Lindqvist 2008; Fuller 2005; Graham 2005; Lehmann-Brauns, Sichau, and Trischler 2010b; Reid and Naylor 2005.

6 See e.g. Anderson 2012; Carbonell 2012; Macdonald and Fyfe 1996; Macdonald 2011; Marstine 2006.

7 For case studies on collections-based research projects, see e.g. Cavalli-Björkman and Lindqvist 2008; Fleming 2010; Herle 2013; Lehmann-Brauns, Sichau, and Trischler 2010a; Meineke et al. 2018; Moser 2010; Tybjerg 2017.

8 Research and Museums (RAM): Proceedings of an International Symposium in Stockholm 22–25 May 2007 (Cavalli-Björkman and Lindqvist 2008) and The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship (Lehmann-Brauns, Sichau, and Trischler 2010a). Other significant contributions can be found in a special issue of Museum Management and Curatorship 2005, consisting of conference proceedings from the Canadian Museums Association’s 2005 meeting on research. In that issue, Anderson’s paper offers a wide-ranging illustration of the position of research in museums at that time, largely from a British perspective.

9 Foucault conceived of the episteme as a tool to describe a particular world-view or a certain structure of thought that characterised a total set of relations, bound to particular periods in history. For further reading on this subject, see The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Foucault 1970) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1974).

10 To name a few examples of research-intensive museums, see the Natural History Museum London, the British Museum, Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the German Historical Museum, the National Museum of Denmark, and the Gothenburg Botanical Garden. Research profiles are also common in museums affiliated with universities, serving as teaching and research platforms, e.g., Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, the Museum of Arcaheology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Design Museum at Zürich University of the Arts, the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Glyptoteket in Copenhagen, and the National Museum of Iceland as part of the University of Iceland.

11 This trend is in line with other new and emerging forms of research as seen for instance in feminist and posthuman research; see e.g. Barad 2007; Feyerabend 1978; Haraway 1988; hooks 1990; Harding 1992; Smith 1999. A fertile field of creative research forms is also found in visual anthropology and sensory ethnography, e.g., Pink 2009; Schneider 2013; Schneider and Wright 2005, 2010. Also, the emerging field of artistic research offers an interesting debate within the field itself on the development of art practice into art research, e.g., Borgdorff and Schwab 2014; Borgdorff 2012; Dombois et al. 2012; Kaila, Seppä, and Slager 2017; Michelkevičius 2018; Rogoff 2017.