Interfaith dialogue at peace museums in Kenya

This paper makes a case for further studies on the contribution of peace museums to interfaith dialogue debate. Based on our experiences as museum curators, teachers and peace researchers and a review of published materials, we argue that there is a lacuna in the study on the contribution of peace museums to the interfaith dialogue debate. The development of community peace museums in Kenya,, in predominantly Christian communities, and the use of traditional religio-cultural artefacts in peace education and peace building is a case of interfaith dialogue worth documenting. With religious conflict threatening to tear the fabric of society apart, the question of interfaith dialogue is now paramount in the search for sustainable peace and development.     

The Quality of Annual Reporting by Italian Museums: An International Comparison

We study the quality of disclosure and the level of accountability of Italian museums using MPADI2 index (Wei et al. 2008; Botes et al. 2013) on a sample of 13 annual reports which, given the legal status of some entities, encompasses the activity of 93 Italian public and private museums, many of which are within the most visited in Italy and worldwide. The results allow for an international comparison with the annual reports of a panel of USA, UK and European museums which have undergone the same MPADI2 analysis, giving an interesting insight about museum different disclosing practices across countries.     

布拉格之春述评

布拉格之春是捷克斯洛伐克从本国的实际条件出发,致力于建设一个新的、民主的、符合捷克斯洛伐克条件的社会主义改革之路。它标志着社会主义国家第二次改革高潮达到顶峰;但却在苏联的武力下夭折了。尽管如此,"布拉格之春"还是顺应了历史发展的潮流,对我国的社会主义建设具有重要的启示。     

Mentoring and Change in Cultural Organizations: The Experience of Directors in British National Museums

In management and arts management literature, mentoring is generally associated with social reproduction and emulation, and illustrates a phenomenon that is rather conservative in nature. Rarely is mentoring associated with change. In this article, we explore how mentoring has been a force of renewal for the institutional culture of British museums. This qualitative research brings attention to mentoring as a lever for cultural change through the experience of a new cohort of museum directors—one that has translated a new vision and approach to museums and the public into reality, and has brought forward the Labour government's cultural policy ideals.     

Performance Evaluation in the Arts and Cultural Sector: A Story of Accounting at Its Margins

In this article, I present a review of financial and management accounting literature on the arts and cultural sector. My objective is to understand to what extent this literature is able to offer a critical perspective on the study of performance evaluation practices in arts and cultural organizations, as it is currently missing in the arts management literature. Adopting a critical perspective means shifting the focus of research from the technicalities of evaluation rules and procedures to their embodiment by the different organizational and societal actors of the arts and cultural sector.     

The Intellectual and Cultural Dimensions of International Relations: Present Ironies and Future Possibilities

Reported is a study that focused on the Millennial Generation and potential differences in viewing an exhibition in person versus online. The exhibition featured the artwork of Paul-Henri Bourguignon, whose extensive body of work includes a variety of paintings and drawings that employ a wide range of styles. Some viewers traveled to the physical space of a museum gallery, while others viewed reproductions of the same works on the Internet. Informants engaged in reflexive self-interviews using Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. The authors compare viewers’ responses to works experienced in person versus online and discuss implications.     

Reconstruction and reparations: Lessons from China and the Pan-African world

Abstract

This article addresses the role of the university and institutions of higher learning in carrying out the mandate of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR), held in Durban, South Africa in 2001. The active contribution of the university is anticipated in Article 98 of the Programme of Action published in the Report of the World Conference (2001), which clearly states:

We emphasize the importance and necessity of teaching about the facts and truth of the history of humankind from antiquity to the recent past, as well as of teaching about the facts and truth of the history, causes, nature and consequences of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, with a view to achieving a comprehensive and objective cognizance of the tragedies of the past.     

Social Media Engagement of Berlin and Prague Museums

ABSTRACT

Attracting visitors and engaging them effectively in the highly competitive and saturated environment shaped by Web 2.0 and online social networking forces museums to creatively and purposefully examine channels for extended interaction with audiences. This exploratory and comparative research aims to compare the state of social media strategies across museums of two regions and to identify the influence of applied strategies on users’ reactions. The surveyed sample considers 296 museums from two European capitals—Berlin and Prague—whose activity has been observed during a three-month period. The findings identify the differences in the approaches of museums and suggest that the frequency and characteristics of published messages correlate to the level of fan reactions, facilitating targeted relationship-building possibilities with online audiences. They further imply that the museums can influence the engagement of visitors by focusing on the particular properties of their posts, both in the sense of post structure, media application, and underlying semantic features.     

Teaching silence in the schoolroom: whither national history in Sierra Leone and El Salvador?

This article addresses the divergent cultures of silence and memorialisation about the civil wars in Sierra Leone and El Salvador, and examines the role that sites of remembering and forgetting play in crafting post-war citizens. In the formal education sector the ministries of education in each country have taken different approaches to teaching the history of the war, with Sierra Leone emphasising forgetting and El Salvador geared towards remembering war history. In both countries nongovernmental actors, particularly peace museums, are filling the memory gap. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in each country, the article documents how the culture of silence that pervades Sierra Leone enables a progress-driven ‘looking forward’ without teaching the past, while El Salvador is working on weaving a culture of memorialisation into its democratisation process. The article argues that knowledge about civil war history can raise young people’s awareness of the consequences of violence and promote civic engagement in its deterrence.     

“Walls made out of paper”: Witnessing wit and how I learned to drive

The article proposes an alternative performative methodology for displaying sexuality in public spaces called queer curatorship. Specifically, it examines Isaac Julien's film The Attendant and a Chicago leathersex museum (The Leather Archives &; Museum) wherein histories of sadomasochistic sex practices and slavery dangerously crisscross on the surface of objects. Tyburczy posits that sites that feature materials such as real Antebellum slave whips alongside objects used as instruments of consensual pleasure and pain offer unique opportunities to reconfigure, recode, and reanimate epistemological frameworks for understanding the history of sexual equipment, the perversion and eroticization of power exchange, and the mutually constitutive relationship between histories of eroticism and histories of discipline. Cultivating the visual lessons learned from The Attendant into new curatorial models enacted during her tenure as a museum curator at the Leather Archives &; Museum, Tyburczy ultimately proposes queer curatorship as an experimental museum practice that stages alternative configurations between objects and bodies in space to alter the historical relationship of race, sex, and power as they relate to particular objects and acts, in this instance the use of whips in interracial scenes of sex and violence.