Editorial

in Museum Worlds
Author:
Conal McCarthy
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Alison K. Brown
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Museum studies is an academic and practical field of research that is ever expanding and alive with potential, opportunity, and challenge paralleling the extraordinary growth of museums in every part of the world. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, launched in 2012, has responded to the need for a rigorous, in-depth review of current work in museums and related industries, including galleries, libraries, archives, and cultural heritage. The inspiration for the journal came from Howard Morphy, Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, along with founding editors Kylie Message, also at the ANU, and Sandra Dudley from the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.

Museum studies is an academic and practical field of research that is ever expanding and alive with potential, opportunity, and challenge paralleling the extraordinary growth of museums in every part of the world. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, launched in 2012, has responded to the need for a rigorous, in-depth review of current work in museums and related industries, including galleries, libraries, archives, and cultural heritage. The inspiration for the journal came from Howard Morphy, Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, along with founding editors Kylie Message, also at the ANU, and Sandra Dudley from the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.

Now Museum Worlds has reached its tenth year. We are particularly pleased to include in this issue an article by Kylie Message on “Museums and the Citizenship of Hate” and, in a new section profiling leading thinkers in the field, a conversation between Howard Morphy and Jason Gibson in which they discuss Morphy's early influences as well the transformations in museum anthropology of which he has very much been part during in his lengthy career as a researcher, curator, and teacher. The section also includes a review of one of Morphy's recent books, Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value, coauthored with Robyn McKenzie.

The journal has grown and developed over the decade since its first issue in 2012. There have been special sections on repatriation, museum collections, museum archaeology, the legacy of museum anthropology, contemporary museum-like cultural politics, and essays in honor of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. We have had a forum on museums and mental health, surveys on museums after COVID-19, and commentary and conversations on a host of other relevant concerns. Our most cited articles include Ross Parry's “The End of the Beginning: Normativity in the Postdigital Museum,” Anthony Shelton's “Critical Museology: A Manifesto,” and Rhiannon Mason's thoughts on what she called “cosmopolitan museology,” along with popular pieces by Tony Bennett, Andrea Witcomb, Laura Peers, Sharon MacDonald, and other leading scholars. It has been very pleasing to see a lot of writing by young and emerging scholars, and by museum professionals, and to see how these writers have engaged with both theory and practice. There was another recent step forward in 2020, when Museum Worlds became part of the Berghahn Open Anthro initiative, which has enhanced our reach and impact through an equitable and sustainable model. Over ten years we have seen our readership grow and our content diversify, the kind of inclusion and breadth which is essential for recalling, revising, and expanding museum studies and practice as a more truly global field that is engaged with current issues in the museum sector.

For this tenth issue of Museum Worlds, as current editors we were keen to take stock of where things are at in museums worldwide. Over recent years we have been working to widen our coverage of the subject beyond the North Atlantic, and along with increasingly diverse content in the journal we have striven to include reviews of books and exhibitions from other parts of the globe, facilitated through a growing team of reviews editors. The most recent, Jesmael Mataga, joins us from Sol Plaatje University (Kimberley, South Africa), while Kirsty Kernohan, from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, is covering the UK. We are delighted that we will be able to feature a special section on museological developments in Africa in next year's issue and are planning a section on decolonization and its discontents, along with the next of our profiles of leading thinkers in museum studies and museum anthropology.

In late 2021 we put out a call for papers inviting a wide range of contributions that identify, explore, and analyze current trends in museum-related research and practice. We are especially pleased to have received submissions on a series of “hot” topics, which can be seen in the research articles, the varied pieces in the section on research in other forms, and in the reviews and review essays. These topics include decolonization, Indigenous museologies, repatriation, teaching and learning in museum studies, how museums have responded to the pandemic, and museum developments in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific, and Latin America.

The research articles reflect this geographical diversity and the focus on urgent current issues. Kyle Message tackles the tricky debates circling around museums and the citizenship of hate, with reference to museum research and practice in the US and Australia. Marcus Vinicius Rosário de Silva and Walbe Ornstein consider climate change and cultural resilience in Brazilian museums. André Caiado writes about the representation of “difficult pasts” in military museums in Portugal, in particular the Portuguese Colonial War. Liora Aldes and Tally Katz-Gerro explore the various social factors that shape the artistic repertoire of art museums in Israel. The ways in which language and law are mobilized in relation to matters of ownership, power, and control are discussed in two articles. Leonie Treier considers how repatriation discourse has been used in connection with the Maison Tropicales, prefabricated houses linked with the French colonial agenda, while Emily Jean Leischner examines how Nuxalk people in Canada are using Indigenous governance and sovereignty to challenge museum authority. Finally, Tehmina Goskar draws on the Citizen Curators project in the UK to examine how cultural democracy plays out in museum inclusivity programs.

Next up, the section on research in other forms has another brace of articles, reports, and conversations on important contemporary topics in the sector: from Canada, Laura Phillips reports on her experience teaching a course on decolonizing and Indigenizing curatorial and museum practices; from Brazil, Marília Xavier Cury and Rebeca Ribeiro Bombonato describe the collaborative practices in archaeology and ethnology museums that are enabling the self-representation of Indigenous peoples; Noga Raved and Havatzelet Yahel recount the many changes that museums are undergoing in response to COVID-19 (a familiar theme to readers of the last two issues of Museum Worlds); and a panel of speakers from the University of Sydney in Australia discuss the pandemic and related processes of recovery and reimagination that point toward the possible future of museums. Following these are conference reports, reviews, and think pieces on a range of events: an important exhibition in Germany responding to the environmental crises, the repatriation of human remains in France, and Indigenous women “talking critically” in museums in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Finally, we are pleased to present a much fuller reviews section of the journal, which, with the gradual opening of the museum world, have thankfully expanded with more exhibitions and more books available in print and online. The reviews and review essays also reflect the major themes of the day, with major pieces by Henrietta Lidchi on Gerald McMaster's online series Indigenizing the (Art) Museum, by Vibe Nielsen on Csilla Ariese and Magdalena Wróblewska's Practicing Decoloniality in Museums, and by Jesmael Mataga on Raymond Silverman, George Abungu, and Peter Probst's National Museums in Africa.

Thanks as always are due. We want to thank our hardworking reviews editors for their time and effort in identifying exhibitions and books, finding reviewers, and overseeing texts, images, and permissions. We also want to thank our many talented and patient contributors, who have written the articles, reports, interviews, conversations, and reviews that make up the contents of the journal. Thank you to our reliable and indefatigable stable of peer reviewers, without whom there would be no journal at all. Thank you to Susette Goldsmith for essential and timely editorial assistance, and to our expert and supportive production editor Janine Latham and the rest of the team at Berghahn for making this publication possible. And lastly, we thank our readers for taking the time to consult these pages from 2012 to 2022. We look forward to the next ten years.

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Advances in Research