Aims & Scope

Visit the new Museum Worlds website here!

Museum Worlds: Advances in Research is a multidisciplinary, refereed, annual journal that publishes work that significantly advances knowledge of global trends, case studies, and theory relevant to museum practice and scholarship around the world.

Responding to the need for a rigorous, in-depth review of current work in its field, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research contributes to the ongoing formation of Museum Studies as an academic and practical area of research that is rapidly expanding and alive with potential, opportunity, and challenge that parallels the rapid growth of museums in just about every part of the world.

Museum Worlds aims to trace and comment on major regional, theoretical, methodological, and topical themes and debates, and to encourage comparison of museum theories, practices, and developments in different global settings. Each issue includes a conversation piece on a current topic, as well as peer-reviewed scholarly articles and review articles, book and exhibition reviews, and news on developments in museum studies and related curricula in different parts of the world. Drawing on the expertise and networks of a global Editorial Board of senior scholars and museum practitioners, the journal both challenges and develops the core concepts that link different disciplinary perspectives on museums by bringing new voices into ongoing debates and discussions. Articles are of exceptional quality and general interest from around the world.

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Current Issue

Volume 5, 2017

I. SPECIAL SECTION: RITUAL REPATRIATION

Guest Editors: Laura Peers, Lotten Gustafsson Reinius, and Jennifer Shannon

Introduction: Repatriation and Ritual, Repatriation as Ritual
Laura Peers, Lotten Gustafsson Reinius, and Jennifer Shannon

Articles

The Magic of Bureaucracy: Repatriation as Ceremony
Laura Peers

The Three Burials of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby: Repatriation Narratives and Ritual Performances
Stein R. Mathisen

Unpacking the Museum Register: Institutional Memories of the Potlatch Collection Repatriation
Emma Louise Knight

Tlingit Repatriation in Museums: Ceremonies of Sovereignty
Aldona Jonaitis

Hopi Renewal and (Ritualized) Performance under American Law
Helen A. Robbins and Leigh Kuwanwisiwma

The Ritual Labour of Reconciliation: An Autoethnography of a Return of Human Remains
Lotten Gustafsson Reinius

Ritual Processes of Repatriation: A Discussion
Edited by Jennifer Shannon

Contributors: Sonya Atalay; Jisgang, Nika Collison; Te Herekiekie Herewini; Eric Hollinger; Michelle Horwood; Robert W. Preucel; Anthony Shelton; and Paul Tapsell

II. SPECIAL SECTION: ENGAGING ANTHROPOLOGICAL LEGACIES

Guest Editors: Sharon Macdonald, Henrietta Lidchi, and Margareta von Oswald

Introduction: The Burdens and Potentials of the Past—Engaging Anthropological Legacies toward Cosmo-optimistic Futures?
Sharon Macdonald, Henrietta Lidchi, and Margareta von Oswald

Articles

Reassembling The Social Organization: Museums, Collaboration and Digital Media in the Making and Remaking of Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph
Aaron Glass, Judith Berman, and Rainer Hatoum

Sharing Knowledge as a Step toward an Epistemological Pluralization of the Museum
Andrea Scholz

Online Documents of India’s Past: Digital Archives and Memory Production
Katja Müller

“We Owe a Historical Debt to No One”: The Rehabilitation and Mobilization of Photographic Images from a Museum Collection by Kachin Youth
Helen Mears

Conjunctures and Convergences: Remaking the World Cultures Displays at the National Museum of Scotland
Henrietta Lidchi

Engaging Dialogues: Re-framing Africa at the Royal Ontario Museum
Silvia Forni

Decolonizing Research, Cosmo-optimistic Collaboration? Making Object Biographies
Margareta von Oswald and Verena Rodatus

III. REPORT

Art of Solidarity, International Slavery Museum, Liverpool
David Fleming

IV. EXHIBITIONS

Exhibition Review Essays

Listen Hear: The Art of Sound (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston)
Sheila K. Hoffman

Distressed Walls and Flânering: The Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016
Sarita Sundar

Exhibition Reviews

Louvre No. 9: Manga, the 9th Art (Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Nagoya)
Masaaki Morishita

Ikunde, Barcelona, Colonial Metropolis (Museum of World Cultures Barcelona)
Fabien Van Geert

Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia)
Sharon Ann Holt

World War I and American Art (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, New York, and Nashville)
Sharon Ann Holt

V. BOOKS

Book Review Essay

Steve BROWN, Steve, Anne CLARKE, and Ursula FREDERICK, eds., Object Stories: Artifacts and Archaeologists
Kylie Message

Book Reviews

Noriko ASO, Mariko, Public Properties: Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan
Masaaki Morishita

Nicholas THOMAS, Nicholas, The Return of Curiosity: What Museums Are Good for in the Twenty-First Century
Conal McCarthy

Gail Dexter LORD, Gail Dexter, and Ngaire BLANKENBERG, eds., Cities, Museums and Soft Power
Lee Davidson