Month: March 2014

Marking Museum Week: #AskTheCurator or View the Book

This week hundreds of museums across the United Kingdom and Europe are participating in Twitter’s first Museum Week campaign. Each day during this week is associated with a hashtag, from #DayInTheLife to #MuseumMemories, all intended to hit on various delightful aspects of the museum world. Today’s hashtag, #AskTheCurator is an opportunity to engage with museum experts. But for those who prefer to engage with experts the classic way — by way of their books — we have curated a collection of some of our Museum Studies titles in the following gallery.

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EXTREME COLLECTING

Challenging Practices for 21st Century Museums

Edited by Graeme Were and J. C. H. King

By exploring the processes of collecting, which challenge the bounds of normally acceptable practice, this book debates the practice of collecting ‘difficult’ objects, from a historical and contemporary perspective; and discusses the acquisition of objects related to war and genocide, and those purchased from the internet, as well as considering human remains, mass produced objects and illicitly traded antiquities. Much of the book engages with the question of the limits to the practice of collecting as a means to think through the implementation of new strategies. Continue reading “Marking Museum Week: #AskTheCurator or View the Book” →

Storms, Sickness, Suspicions: The Darker Side of Migration

In Points of Passage: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880-1914, published last October, contributors reveal some of the less-savory aspects of immigration (of which there were many). Following, in an excerpt from the newly published volume, editor Tobias Brinkmann gives two examples of passengers enduring misery before arriving on the supposed paradise of North American soil. This is the second entry about the book; read the former here.
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The essay collection “Points of Passage” seeks to shift attention from the well-known success story of Jewish immigration in the United States to the journey. On which paths did Jewish (and other) migrants travel from Eastern Europe to the ports on the North Sea and across the Atlantic between the 1880s and the 1920s, and which obstacles did they face? Researching the paths of migration can be much more challenging than studying immigration.

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‘Youth Bulge’ and Social Change in Tajikistan

It is common for a society’s population to grow exponentially after a war. In the U.S., the best example of this “youth bulge” is the population of post-World War II “Baby Boomers.” In her soon-to-be-released volume, Domesticating Youth: Youth Bulges and their Socio-political Implications in Tajikistan, Sophie Roche explores this phenomenon in post-civil war Tajikistan and what its implications may be. Following, the author reflects on her fieldwork, and shares how it felt to return to her site after a decade of absence.

 

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With an ethnographic book a story is out in the world that has been documented for a while but that does not stop with the last page but continues to develop. Often after reading an ethnographic study I wonder what happened to the actors in the book, some of whom we are introduced very intimately; what happened to the place, the village, the authorities, the children? Where they really just living to be examples of a theory? How does the story of the people develop after the book?

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Not So Different After All: Connecting British and Bengali Education Systems

Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education, edited by Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere, has recently been published by Berghahn. The editors previously shared an excerpt from the volume’s Introduction, which can be read here. A second extract, this one from Mary Hilton’s chapter “A Transcultural Transaction: William Carey’s Baptist Mission, the Monitorial Method and the Bengali Renaissance,” gives readers insight into the education system shared between Britain and Bengal.

 

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To understand the early-nineteenth-century reforming mentality that drove change in both Britain and Bengal, we must first sketch those systems of basic education that prevailed in their traditional rural communities before the English industrial revolution and before the development of the fully evangelical, self-righteous and reforming mercantile thrust of English imperialism.

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The Ethical Sequence of Eugenics?

If you could modify the human population to be more intelligent or more beautiful, would you? When this idea of eugenics — or selectively breeding a population with more “desirable” traits — was first popularized in the twentieth century, such contemporary figures as Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, H.G. Wells, and, not surprisingly, Adolf Hitler, were supporters. Now, with renewed interest in the science of eugenics, editors Calum MacKellar and Christopher Bechtel explore the unsavory aspects and issues in The Ethics of the New Eugenics, to be published this month. Following, the editors explain what led them to study this science, and what may be ahead for the field.

 

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What drew you to the study of eugenics?

 

Calum MacKellar: Over the many years that I have worked in the field of human bioethics, I have always suspected that the topic of eugenics would eventually come back to haunt society.

Continue reading “The Ethical Sequence of Eugenics?” →

The Author and Ingmar Bergman: Two Legacies Endure

John Orr’s proposal for a text on Swedish director Ingmar Bergman first came to Berghahn in 2009. In September 2010, however, the prominent film scholar passed away with a manuscript in peer review. It was Professor Orr’s wife, Anne, who took up the finalization of the book, shepherding it through stages of review, revision and production to its publication. Now, this month, The Demons of Modernity: Ingmar Bergman and European Cinema will be published. Following, Anne Orr, who wrote about her experience in the volume’s Afterword, briefly introduces the book and what it meant to help bring it to fruition.

 

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When my husband John Orr died suddenly during the writing of The Demons of Modernity, it was comforting to be assured by two of the foremost experts on Ingmar Bergman – Peter Cowie and Maaret Koskinen – that they considered the manuscript as it stood an original and worthwhile contribution to studies of Bergman.

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Egress and Ingress: Exploring ‘Points of Passage’

Ellis Island in New York City is a historically recognized entrance point for European migrants to the United States. But if this is so well-known, then why do we know so little about the points of departure? This is one of many research questions that informed the writing of Points of Passage: Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880-1914, published last October. Following, an excerpt from the volume — bookended by comments from editor Tobias Brinkmann — delves deeper into these queries.

 

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When I began researching the history of Jewish migrations in the 1990s I concentrated on immigrants. I collected sources on the settlement of Jewish immigrants from small villages in the Central and Eastern European countryside in Chicago between 1840 and 1900. Within a few years the immigrants built a Jewish community, prospered economically and became respected members of Chicago’s social and political circles. My first book concentrated on two major research questions that continue to drive immigration studies: the impact of forces strengthening or weakening ethnic communities, and the impact of assimilation processes on immigrants.

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for February

International Journal of Social Quality
Volume 3, Issue 2
This issue assembles contributions from the global North and South to inquire into the future of the “social” from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on sociology, political science and law. What does “social” mean, and do social policy and the welfare state have a future in a global age?

Religion and Society: Advances in Research
Volume 4, Issue 1
This issue is titled “Ends and Beginnings” and features articles covering a range of topics. There is also a debate section and news and reviews sections.

Learning and Teaching
Volume 6, Issue 2
The four articles in this issue examine students’ experiences of what has become known as ‘scholarship of engagement’, a philosophy of higher education pedagogy.

 

The Reciprocal Relationship of Media and Movement

Editors Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Sivertsen and Rolf Werenskjold’s volume Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present was published last month. Following, the editors introduce the timely volume and share an excerpt from the Introduction. 

 

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Looking at journals, television, or on the internet in these days, news dealing with protests abounds: the upheavals around the Euro-Maidan in the Ukraine, anti-governmental protests in Bangkok, the “Occupy-Gezi-Park”-manifestations in Istanbul or protest actions of NGOs like Greenpeace against oil companies or whale hunters. Obviously protest has an enormous “news value”: it offers spectacular pictures, it makes evident political conflicts and decisions by polarizing their actors, and it offers media the chance to perform as center of society.

Continue reading “The Reciprocal Relationship of Media and Movement” →