Museums as Collaboration Zones

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” 192.

2 Ibid.

3 Pratt, Imperial Eyes. She writes that contact zones are “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (8).

4 Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum, 89.

5 Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” 193.

6 Bennet, Culture, 213.

7 Sternfeld, Das radikaldemokratische Museum, 21.

8 As Robin Boast points out, Clifford notes that “autoethnography is as much a part of the contact zone as is transculturation. However, it is the forgotten part. This is very strange, though probably very telling, as both Clifford (1997:213) and Pratt (1991:34) made clear that autoethnography is one of the most significant, and most neocolonial, aspects of all contact zones. Pratt explained that autoethnographic texts are not forms of self-representation or autochthonous expression. Rather, they are those texts, written by the Other, that mix indigenous idioms within metropolitan and academic modes.” Clifford is arguing that this form is not just literary; it is also how museum work. Boast, “Neocolonial Collaboration,” 60.

9 Kampschulte and Hatcher, “Changing Museums Through Cooperation and Collaboration,” 77.

10 Berry, “A Focus on Art Museum/School Collaborations,” 8–14; Wilson, A Quiet Revolution; Hord, “A Synthesis of Research on Organizational Collaboration.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathaniel Prottas

Nathaniel Prottas has worked in museum education for over 20 years, beginning as a lecturer at the Cloisters in New York. Since 2017 he has been the Director of Education and Visitor Services at the Wien Museum (the City Museum of Vienna) in Austria. Nathaniel holds Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MA in the same subject from University College, London. He has taught both museum education and museum studies as a visiting professor at The Central European University (Austria), The Technical University of Dortmund (Germany), Tulane University (Ferrara, Italy), Masaryk University (Czech Republic), and the University of Vienna (Austria). His publications have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, Museum Worlds, and most recently in the edited volume, Presence in Art and Art in the Present.