Description
Book SynopsisAfter visiting hundreds of museums across Alberta, Lianne McTavish chronicles some of the most challenging and unexpected sites where the idea of the museum is being reshaped. Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.
Trade Review"Voluntary Detours is a great book. Lianne McTavish writes about each museum with such a careful eye for detail that the exhibitions, founders, volunteers, and locations come vividly alive to the reader. She then develops these observations into wide-ranging critical arguments about people's practical, political, and emotional relationship to museums. This ability to combine description with cultural debate is itself a real skill; it is only because the writing is so lucid and elegant that she makes it looks easy." Fiona Candlin, Birkbeck, University of London, and author of Micromuseology: An Analysis of Small Independent Museums
“The first book to closely examine small-town and rural museums across Alberta, Voluntary Detours is an important contribution to critical museum studies. Indebted to the work of Fiona Candlin on micromuseums in the UK, the book addresses a selection of institutions that have been underexamined in Alberta, an oversight which has contributed to the sense that large urban museums are supposedly superior.” RACAR
