Museums and Society: The Power of Display in Washington DC

3 credits · Undergraduate

This course explores museums as dynamic sites of intellectual and cultural debate, and as institutions vested with the authority to define aesthetics, history, heritage, and even citizenship. Now more than ever, as the process of globalization raises questions about the fluidity, preservation, and "authenticity" of culture, museums of all kinds are attracting great interest both as places to visit and as a subject of critical analysis in their own right. As places defined by the collection, display, and interpretation of objects, museums are bound up in questions of permanence and transience, difference and identity, equity and privilege--issues that lie at the heart of what is termed the "new museology." But as institutional repositories of community memory or indigenous knowledge, they are also bound up in questions of representation, access and ownership--issues that move the debate over museum collections squarely into the politics of local, state, and national control over heritage. If ownership and control are the new realities of international heritage policy (and law), museums have quickly emerged as important sites on which and through which these claims are being made.