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Drawing on a narrative study of Australian visitors to the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, this article explores the hermeneutic complexities of migration encounters through the meaning-making processes of museum visitors. Throughout this process of interpretive negotiations, museum exhibitions and visitor biographies become intertwined through narratives of migration. The empirical evidence emphasizes that the humanization of migration through stories and faces renders possible an understanding, explanation, and critique of sociopolitical contexts through the experience of human beings. Migration emerges as a practice that transforms cosmopolitanism from an abstract, normative ideal into a lived, interpreted reality. This article, then, is devoted to the cosmohermeneutics of migration encounters, that is, to an experienced and thus “actually existing cosmopolitanism” (Malcomson 1998) that entangles self and other through visitors' interpretive dialectics of reflexivity and empathy. The article suggests a cosmopolitan museum practice that opens interpretive spaces for shifting subjectivities and multiple identifications across differences and commonalities.

Dubai is often characterized as a city of artificiality and repackaged public spaces—a city without a past. The old historic Dubai has essentially disappeared, lost in the shadows of iconic resort projects and popular shopping malls. This article asks the following question: how do Dubai's museums function in relation to an urban field for the most part bereft of historical fabric, and in which the history that is made visible within the public realm is largely fictional or highly sanitized? We argue that to make sense of the ways history is represented and circulated in Dubai's public spaces, the traditional category of “museum” should be extended to include both large-scale history-themed malls and small heritage houses. Taken altogether, Dubai's museums and museum-like institutions constitute a conceptually complete and closed system that manages to “resolve” the apparent paradox of an urban context characterized by absence and historical loss, in which, paradoxically, expressions of historical fullness are everywhere.

Fetish Modernity (Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm)

Remaking an Ethnographic Museum in Cologne (The New Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum—Cultures of the World)

The George W. Bush Presidential Center (Dallas, Texas)

Moving on Asia: Towards a New Art Network 2004–2013 (Gallery LOOP, Seoul, and City Gallery Wellington)

L'Art Nouveau: La Révolution Décorative and Tamara de Lempicka (La Reine de l'Art Déco, Pinacothèque de Paris)

Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst, Glyptothek, and Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Tangible Splendor: The Chi Chang Yuan Collection of Lacquer with Mother-of-Pearl Inlay (National Museum of History, Taipei)

First Peoples (Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum Linda Young)

The National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History, and the National Museum of Peruvian Culture, Lima

David Bowie Is (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin)

This article explores the continuing evolution of biennials, particularly those outside the traditional European/North American “centers”. From their early beginnings in Venice in 1895, biennials have become one of the most vital and visible sites for the production, distribution, and discussion of contemporary art. A “third wave” of biennials in the 1980s was part of a growing focus on a global “south”, and played a key role in redefining notions of center and periphery in the global contemporary art world. This article shows how the São Paulo, Sydney, and Istanbul biennials were part of these trends toward the “biennialization” of contemporary art, mass spectatorship, the interweaving of the global and the local, and the rise of a generation of nomadic curators and artists whose work exemplified these themes. It argues that the most recent editions of these biennials may reflect a further shift in the evolution of the biennial model: a possible fourth wave, where the biennial provides an international platform for local politics.

Bringing together a retheorization of the “contact zone” (Pratt 1992; Clifford 1997) and the idea of hybridity, this article uses these concepts as analytic tools to raise questions about the meaning and materiality of objects in the collections at the Manchester Museum. Through a series of case studies I illustrate how connections spanning centuries between West Africa and the northwest of England are embodied in museum collections. By focusing on the materiality of museum objects it is possible to unravel these connections, as well as the fractions and fissures they point to.

Learning networks do not arise from nothing. They are born out of personal connections, exchanged conversations, constructed spaces, and shared visions. Other broader contexts (e.g., the theoretical contexts or funding policies available within a globalized economy) are also part of this landscape. The Museum Mediators in Europe course is one of such learning networks that came to be in 2013 with the aim of representing institutional and professional needs of mediation professionals in the European countries involved in this project: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Estonia. The project argues that a clearly defined set of best practices in museum education is called for and that leadership/mentoring programs for museum mediators should be utilized to foster professional learning communities within museums.

For this edition of Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, we have asked a group of museum practitioners to respond to a thought-provoking article about a Taiwanese project that explored the particular needs of visitors diagnosed with schizophrenia. Allegaert, Besley, Coleborne, Chynoweth, Gale, and Sirik have used Chen et al.’s article as a jumping off point from which to write on the broader topic of mental health provision in museums’ engagement programs from their own international perspectives. Th e forum was convened by Sandra Dudley and curated by Amy Jane Barnes.