Session: #150

Content:

Recent years have seen a swathe of new museums and heritage centres – including the Moesgaard Museum, Denmark and the Museum of Montegrotto Terme, Italy – opening and exploring aspects of Europe’s past through a rich diversity of both sites and finds. In this session, the third in a series, we want to focus on the role of archaeological museums in shaping the historical context of a nation’s identity and how the reflexes around new heritage and greater public engagement are/should be captured in museum spaces.
Museum professionals are increasingly experimenting with ways that public debate can be facilitated, to help give people space to consider and reframe their thoughts about a multiplicity of issues. Who is to set the agenda in a time where visitor numbers are crucial to museum survival? How do we navigate between what the public wants to hear, and what we think they need to hear? What stories do we want to tell the public, and how do we want to tell them?
For this session we want to encourage a Europe-wide response from a cross-section of recent projects. We want to hear about successes, failures and plans for the future to promote an holistic understanding. We also want to consider how the future might look for this critical practice that creates a space where science, curation and citizen engagement interact. We want to explore scale, diversity, purpose, financing, community engagement, local vs tourism and archaeological value through case studies as well as thematic papers.

Session: #150

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