Description
Book SynopsisMuseum diplomacy has come to new prominence in the contemporary moment. Museums have increasingly global agendas, advancing diverse international partnerships across the world. Moreover, they hold the potential to advance cross-cultural education and foster mutual understanding at a moment when we are beset by global challenges. Acknowledging the troubled histories of these institutions and their contested status, Museum Diplomacy: How Cultural Institutions Shape Global Engagement recognizes the pivotal contributions of museums? global work, while also grappling with the significant issues, questions and possibilities that these activities raise. The collection features examinations of museum diplomacy by fifteen leading scholars and museum practitioners. These texts address global case studies that speak to museum practices related to objects, collections, and people, and charting foundational concepts and ideas. Taken as a whole, the book provides contemporary examples, grounded in historic context, along with provocations and explorations of best practices, providing points for reflection along with guidance for practitioners and scholars alike. Through these wide-ranging contributions, Museum Diplomacy also contributes a new understanding of cultural diplomacy that recognizes the vital diplomatic work of curators, museum administrators, and other museum professionals, as well as how these practitioners exert their own agency in ways that may or may not align with broader government and institutional agendas. Ultimately, Museum Diplomacy calls on the sector to rethink their perceptions of cultural diplomacy and embrace an expansive understanding of the diplomatic practitioner.
Trade ReviewCultural diplomacy is rapidly becoming a hot topic. As we read of its permutations in this valuable book of essays on the subject, it is a book that will surely influence, even redirect the course of museum practice.
-- William Underwood Eiland, former director, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Global Work of Museum Diplomacy
Sarah E.K. Smith & Sascha Priewe
Chapter 1: Museums as Diplomatic Sites
Sascha Priewe
Chapter 2: Exhibitions and Loans as Cosmopolitan Ambassadors
Lee Davidson & Leticia Pérez Castellanos
Chapter 3: Envoys: Object-Entities and Repatriation in Counter-Hegemonic Museum Diplomacy
Anthony Alan Shelton
Chapter 4: Museum Diplomacy for Sustainable Development and Human Rights
Henry McGhie
Chapter 5: Satellite Museums
Patricia M. Goff
Chapter 6: Terracotta Diplomacy: Challenges and Opportunities
Da Kong
Chapter 7: Museums, Diaspora and Migration: Looking for New Paradigms in ‘Times of Crisis’
Simona Bodo and Anna Chiara Cimoli
Chapter 8: Inclusion and Refusal in Indigenous Museum Diplomacies: Three Moments
Linda Grussani
Chapter 9: Cultural Production as a Diplomatic Process: The National Museum of Qatar
Karen Exell
Chapter 10: Between the US and Asia: Exhibitions and Summits as Cultural Diplomacy
Melissa Chiu
Chapter 11: Smithsonian Global: Looking Beyond Our Borders
Liz Tunick Cedar
Chapter 12: Engaging the World Through Museum Collections and Research
Chen Shen
Chapter 13: Global Museum Networks
Sascha Priewe
Chapter 14: Training & Exchange Programs: Why People Matter
Anaïs Aguerre
Chapter 15: Global Citizenship as an Instrument of Museum Diplomacy
Simge Erdogan-O’Connor
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Index
