Analysing Museum Display: Theory and Method

Analysing Museum Display is the first comprehensive book to bring together approaches to studying museum display. Drawing on global examples, it reviews different theoretical frameworks and methods, charting major contributions to the field and exploring their potentials and limitations.

How and why should we study museum display, and what is its nature as a complex form of representation? The book argues that display is at once material, experiential, and political in producing knowledge and that analysis requires rigorous conceptualization and careful methodologies. It provides a critical guide to existing concepts and methods, exploring how museum display can be understood using semiotic, narrative, cartographic, and spatial analyses, assemblage theory, new materialist and multisensory approaches, and theories of affect, emotion, and historical positioning. Alongside this, Whitehead presents key orientations for research practice relating to objectivity and subjectivity, historical and contextual awareness, and mixing methods.

Analysing Museum Display will be essential reading for scholars and students of museology at all levels. The book will also appeal to museum curators and professionals who are involved in the production of display and wish to develop a more theorised and reflective perspective on their own practice.

Christopher Whitehead is Professor of Museology at Newcastle University, UK, where he is the current Dean of Global Humanities and Social Sciences, and Honorary Professor of Humanities at the Australian National University. He teaches museum and heritage studies, and has trained generations of students in curatorship and exhibition development. He has published extensively on museum history, theory, and practice, and on the politics and experience of heritage and memory. He is series editor of Routledge Critical Heritages of Europe.