Museums as Spaces of Memory, Identity and Activism
INSTRUCTORS
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The course will focus on the role of museums as knowledge-based institutions that create time-framed narratives and that are associated with the construction of national identities and collective memories. It will highlight the historical discourses of the museum in terms of both narratives of display and space/architecture projects. The analysis will also include the use of resources such as museum writing and technologies of storytelling (e.g. films) as mechanisms for the creation of engaging and meaningful interpretive settings. The course will further explore the way people relate to heritage, particularly movable heritage, and how objects are displayed as historical documents, functioning both as material and as semiotic texts. Through the reading and discussion of articles and book chapters, as well as the analysis of case studies, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the historical background of the museum, its main challenges in the present and how it is positioning into the future, the theoretical framework of the field of Museum Studies and the historical agencies of the institution.