The thing about museums

Preface / Sandra Dudley -- 1. Introduction: museums and things / Sandra Dudley -- Part I: Objects and their creation in the museum. Introduction / Jennifer Walklate -- 2. Romancing the Stones: earth science objects as material culture / Hannah-Lee Chalk -- 3. What do we know about what we know? The museum 'register' as museum object / Geoffrey N. Swinney -- 4. Emblematic museum objects of national significance: in search of their multiple meanings and values / Marlen Mouliou and Despina Kalessopoulou -- 5. Musealization processes in the realm of art / Maria Lucia de Niemeyer Matheus Loureiro -- 6. Photography - museum: on posing, imageness, and the punctum / Klaus Wehner -- Part II: Visitors' engagements with museum objects. Introduction / Jennifer Binnie -- 7. Things and theories: the unstable presence of exhibited objects / Chris Dorsett -- 8. Inexperienced museum visitors and how they negotiate contemporary art. A comparative study of two visitor-driven visual art presentations / Marijke Van Eeckhaut -- 9. Illuminating narratives: period rooms and tableaux vivants / Michael Katzberg -- 10. Magic objects/modern objects: heroes' house museums / Linda Young -- 11. 'Do not touch' - a discussion on the problems of a limited sensory experience with objects in a gallery or museum context / Helen Saunderson -- 12. Living objects: a theory of museological objecthood / Wing Yan Vivian Ting -- 13. The poetic triangle of objects, people and writing creatively: using museum collections to inspire linguistic creativity and poetic understanding / Nikki Clayton and Mark Goodwin -- 14. Location and intervention: visual practice enabling a synchronic view of artefacts and sites / Shirley Chubb -- Part III: The uses of objects in museum representations. Introduction / Amy Jane Barnes -- 15. Spectacle and archive in two contemporary art museums in Spain / Roger Sansi -- 16. Playing dress-up: inhabiting imagined spaces through museum objects / Julia Petrov -- 17. Material object and immaterial collector: is there room for the donor-collector discourse in the museal space? / Caroline Bergeron -- 18. Exhibiting absence in the museum / Helen Rees Leahy -- 19. Arctic 'relics': the construction of history, memory and narratives at the National Maritime Museum / Claire Warrior -- Part IV: Objects and difficult subjects Introduction / Julia Petrov -- 20. Challenged pasts and the museum: the case of Ghanaian kente / Malika Kraamer -- 21. Standardizing difference: the materiality of ethnic minorities in the museums of the Peoples' Republic of China / Marzia Varutti -- 22. Displaying the Communist Other: perspectives on the exhibition and interpretation of Communist visual culture / Amy Jane Barnes -- 23. Reconsidering images: using the farm security administration photographs as objects in history exhibitions / Meighen Katz -- 24. (Im)material practices in museums / Alice Semedo -- 25. Heritage as pharmakon and the muses as deconstruction: - problematising curative museologies and heritage healing / Beverley Butler -- Afterword: A conversation with Sue Pearce Amy Jane Barnes and Jennifer Walklate.