Reculturing Museums

<p><em>Reculturing Museums</em> takes a unified sociocultural theoretical approach to analyze the many conflicts museums experience in the 21st century. Embracing conflict, Ash asks: What can practitioners and researchers do to create the change they want to see when old systems remain stubbornly in place?</p><p>Using a unified sociocultural, cultural-historical, activity-theoretical approach to analyzing historically bound conflicts that plague museums, each chapter is organized around a central contradiction, including finances ("<i>Who will pay for museums?</i>"), demographic shifts ("<em>Who will come to museums?</em>"), the roles of narratives ("<i>Whose story is it?</i>"), ownership of objects ("<em>Who owns the artifact?</em>"), and learning and teaching ("<i>What is learning and how can we teach equitably</i>?"). The <i>reculturing</i> stance taken by Ash promotes social justice and equity, ‘making change’ first, within museums, called <i>inreach</i>, rather than outside the museum,<i> </i>called<i> outreach</i>; challenges existing norms; is sensitive to neoliberal and deficit ideologies; and pays attention to the structure agency dialectic.</p><p>Reculturing Museums will be essential reading for academics, students, museum practitioners, educational researchers, and others who care about museums and want to ensure that <i>all</i> people have equal access to the activities, objects, and ideas residing in them. </p> <p>1. Introduction to the main theories and themes of <i>Reculturing Museums; 2. </i>Why do we need theories?; 3. Who will go to museums?; 4. Who will pay for museums?; 5. Whose story is it?; 6. Who owns the artifact?; 7. Where Is the Learning, and Who Gets to Learn?; 8. What do we mean by equitable teaching in museums?; 9. How do we reculture an institution while old museums are still in place?</p>