This informative book takes us around the world to tell the compelling story of how museums today are making sense of immigration and globalization. Based on firsthand conversations with museum directors, curators, and policymakers; descriptions of current and future exhibitions; and inside stories about the famous paintings and iconic objects that define collections across the globe, it provides a close-up view of how different kinds of institutions balance nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

This book addresses how museums forge two-way communication and engaged participation through the use of community curation, social media, collaboration, and inquiry-based learning. Approaches like this demonstrate how museums serve as thriving, central gathering places in communities and offer meaningful, creative educational experiences.

This handy book is designed for museum professionals who are hungry for information about how to design experiences in partnership with their communities. Providing an overview of the many ways that museums around the world have begun to listen more attentively to their audiences, the book highlights the importance of listening to community and discusses the idea of relationship-building as an entry point to relevancy.

Museums have become vital strategic spaces for negotiating ownership of and access to knowledges produced in local settings. This book presents the community-engaged "culture work" of a group of scholars whose collaborative projects consider the social spaces between the museum and community, and offer new ways of addressing the challenges of bridging both the local and the global.

Museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions provide opportunities for people to understand and celebrate who they were, are, and might yet be. These institutions educate the public and civilize society in a variety of ways, and this book documents the phenomenon, explaining how it happens, and also showing how institutions can facilitate this process via exploratory and innovative means.

This title showcases how the use of technology in museums should be understood as factors directly related to the museums’ notion of community, local culture, and place, whether these places are in mid-America, urban metropolises, or ethnically diverse and underserved communities. In it, museum expert Susana Smith Bautista brings more than twenty years of experience in cultural institutes in Los Angeles, New York, and Greece to propose a social understanding of why museums should be adopting technology, and how it should be adapted based on their particular missions, communities, and places.

This title explores how museums can become more active and also considers how they might involve members of their local communities in their everyday work. Examining the key components of the museum-community relationship, it looks at both the impact of museums on the cultural and civic lives of local communities and the impact of local communities on the programs, collections, and organizational culture of museums. Advocating an accessible and inclusive approach to museum management, the author focuses intently on the role of museum leadership in fostering and deepening community relationships.

This book examines how we can conceive of a 'postcolonial museum' in the contemporary epoch of mass migrations, the internet and digital technologies. The authors consider museum spaces, practices and institutions in the light of repressed histories, sounds, voices, images, memories, bodies, expression and cultures, and focus on the transformation of museums as cultural spaces, rather than purely physical places.

Museums may not seem at first glance to be engaged in social work. Yet, Lois H. Silverman brings together here relevant visitor studies, trends in international practice, and compelling examples that demonstrate how museums everywhere are using their unique resources to benefit human relationships and, ultimately, to repair the world. In this groundbreaking book, Silverman forges a framework of key social work perspectives to show how museums are evolving a needs-based approach to provide what promises to be universal social service. In partnership with social workers, social agencies, and clients, museums are helping people cope and even thrive in circumstances ranging from personal challenges to social injustices.