Museums in Focus
About the Book Series
Committed to the articulation of big, even risky, ideas in short-format publications, Museums In Focus challenges authors and readers to experiment with, innovate, and press museums and the intellectual frameworks through which we view these. It offers a platform for approaches that radically rethink the relationships between cultural and intellectual dissent and crisis and debates about museums, politics and the broader public sphere.
Museums In Focus is motivated by the intellectual hypothesis that museums are not innately ‘useful’, safe’ or even ‘public’ places, and that recalibrating our thinking about them might benefit from adopting a more radical and oppositional form of logic and approach. Examining this problem requires a level of comfort with (or at least tolerance of) the idea of crisis, dissent, protest and radical thinking, and authors might benefit from considering how cultural and intellectual crisis, regeneration and anxiety have been dealt with in other disciplines and contexts.
Books published in the series are between 30,000 and 50,000 words in length and fully refereed.
Decolonizing the Museum: Art, Activism and the Question of Race in Curation
1st Edition
By Chiara de Cesari, Wayne Modest, Marta Pagliuca Pelacani
October 02, 2025
This book asks what it means to decolonize museums in theory and practice. It explores recent calls by activists and artists for social change in and through museums, and how museums have responded to these calls and interventions. The point of departure for this volume are the burgeoning global ...
Mind Museums: Former Asylums and the Heritage of Mental Health
1st Edition
By Francesca Lanz
July 31, 2025
Mind Museums offers a fresh perspective on the heritage of mental health, bringing museums into sharp focus. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from architecture, museum and exhibition design, and heritage and museum studies, it examines former psychiatric asylums that have been converted into...
The Black Curator: Activists for Representation, and Decolonization of Museums
1st Edition
By Kemuel Benyehudah
June 20, 2025
The Black Curator highlights the role that Black curators have long played in advocating for black artists and social changes and argues that they made a significant contribution to the democratization of museums over the last 150 years. Drawing on oral testimonies and archival research, this book ...
Museum Representations of Motherhood and the Maternal: Mother Stuff
1st Edition
By Rebecca Louise-Clarke
April 14, 2025
Museum Representations of Motherhood and the Maternal is the first book to address the underrepresentation of motherhood in museums. Questioning how mothering and maternal experiences should be represented in museums, Louise-Clarke argues that such institutions wield the power to influence what we ...
Deaccessioning Museum Objects: Transparency and Ethics in Disposal Practice
1st Edition
By Jennifer Durrant
April 11, 2025
Deaccessioning Museum Objects is an innovative exploration of museum collections management practice and the ethical complexities of object disposal within the contemporary social context. Disposal of objects from museum collections aids in the creation of dynamic and sustainable institutions but ...
Museums as Assemblage: Analysing dynamic museum practice
1st Edition
By Jasmin Pfefferkorn
October 09, 2024
Museums as Assemblage offers a new way of thinking about the dynamism of art museums. Using the concept of assemblage, this book unpacks relations between visitors, artists, museum staff, and the museum’s nonhuman components, providing an analytical framework that celebrates the complexity of ...
Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage: Experiences of Return in Central Australia
1st Edition
By Jason M. Gibson
October 08, 2024
Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage examines how returned materials - objects, photographs, audio and manuscripts - are being received and reintegrated into the ongoing social and cultural lives of Aboriginal Australians. Combining a critical examination of the making of these collections...
Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation: The Keeping Place
1st Edition
By Robert Hudson, Shannon Woodcock
May 27, 2024
Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation explores Indigenous practices of curation, object repatriation, and cross-cultural community engagement in a dynamic Koori museum. Grounded in the fact that Gunai Kurnai people have never ceded sovereignty, the text reorients dominant...
Reflections on Critical Museology: Inside and Outside Museums
1st Edition
By J. Pedro Lorente
September 25, 2023
Reflections on Critical Museology: Inside and Outside Museums offers a reflective and reflexive re-assessment of museum studies and the first wide-ranging account of critical museology. Drawing on an extensive range of examples from museums and across the museological literature, which are ...
Digital Access and Museums as Platforms
1st Edition
By Caroline Wilson-Barnao
January 09, 2023
Digital Access and Museums as Platforms draws on interviews with museum practitioners, along with a range of case studies from public and private institutions, in order to investigate the tensions and benefits involved in making cultural collections available using digital technologies. Taking a ...
Museums and Atlantic Slavery
1st Edition
By Ana Lucia Araujo
January 09, 2023
Museums and Atlantic Slavery explores how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented through words, visual images, artifacts, and audiovisual materials in museums in Europe and the Americas. Divided into four chapters, the book addresses four recurrent themes: wealth ...
Museums as Agents for Social Change: Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum
1st Edition
By Njabulo Chipangura, Jesmael Mataga
January 09, 2023
Museums as Agents for Social Change is the first comprehensive text to examine museum practice in a decolonised moment, moving beyond known roles of object collection and presentation. Drawing on studies of Mutare museum, a regional museum in Eastern Zimbabwe, this book considers how museums with ...