Lianne Mctavish – författare

After 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. The concept of the visit as a “voluntary detour” encapsulates the way visitors travel along backroads to find small-town and rural museums, as well as the agreement to turn away from standard museum scripts when they arrive.Addressing themes of place, land, colonization, rurality, heritage, childhood, and play, McTavish reveals the museum visitor as multifaceted, with locals and tourists often interpreting museums very differently. Case studies include the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, and the Museum of Fear and Wonder. A key chapter analyzing sites devoted to resource extraction explores how these places promote settler colonial understandings of land use. By contrast, Indigenous museums and cultural centres defy colonial messages in displays that adapt and refuse conventional museum formats.Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.

This edited volume, written by historians of art and visual culture who are working in the field of animal studies, seeks to understand how our ways of positioning (and ex-positioning) animals have separated us from the other-than-human animals that are an integral part of our interconnected world.

Bringing together the visual and material culture of display with recent theoretical study on human–animal relations, the book draws attention to ways in which we might rethink this history and map pathways for the future. Defining the idea of exhibition and display broadly, chapters consider a diverse range of media, including paintings, anatomical sculpture, books, prints, and clothing; exhibition venues that take place in both the public and private realms; and key ideas such as looking at/looking back, seeing/being seen, and interspecies recognition. The authors cover topics that span the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries and focus geographically on Europe and America, with significant content related to Canada, Indigenous America, and Latin America.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, museum studies, animal studies, and environmental humanities.

This edited volume, written by historians of art and visual culture who are working in the field of animal studies, seeks to understand how our ways of positioning (and ex-positioning) animals have separated us from the other-than-human animals that are an integral part of our interconnected world.

Bringing together the visual and material culture of display with recent theoretical study on human–animal relations, the book draws attention to ways in which we might rethink this history and map pathways for the future. Defining the idea of exhibition and display broadly, chapters consider a diverse range of media, including paintings, anatomical sculpture, books, prints, and clothing; exhibition venues that take place in both the public and private realms; and key ideas such as looking at/looking back, seeing/being seen, and interspecies recognition. The authors cover topics that span the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries and focus geographically on Europe and America, with significant content related to Canada, Indigenous America, and Latin America.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, museum studies, animal studies, and environmental humanities.