Paul Basu – författare

While many claims are made regarding the power of cultural heritage as a driver and enabler of sustainable development, the relationship between museums, heritage and development has received little academic scrutiny. This book stages a critical conversation between the interdisciplinary fields of museum studies, heritage studies and development studies to explore this under-researched sphere of development intervention. In an agenda-setting introduction, the editors explore the seemingly oppositional temporalities and values represented by these "past-making" and "future-making" projects, arguing that these provide a framework for mutual critique. Contributors to the volume bring insights from a wide range of academic and practitioner perspectives on a series of international case studies, which each raise challenging questions that reach beyond merely cultural concerns and fully engage with both the legacies of colonial power inequalities and the shifting geopolitical dynamics of contemporary international relations. Cultural heritage embodies different values and can be instrumentalized to serve different economic, social and political objectives within development contexts, but the past is also intrinsic to the present and is foundational to people’s aspirations for the future. Museums, Heritage and International Development explores the problematics as well as potentials, the politics as well as possibilities, in this fascinating nexus.

While many claims are made regarding the power of cultural heritage as a driver and enabler of sustainable development, the relationship between museums, heritage and development has received little academic scrutiny. This book stages a critical conversation between the interdisciplinary fields of museum studies, heritage studies and development studies to explore this under-researched sphere of development intervention. In an agenda-setting introduction, the editors explore the seemingly oppositional temporalities and values represented by these "past-making" and "future-making" projects, arguing that these provide a framework for mutual critique. Contributors to the volume bring insights from a wide range of academic and practitioner perspectives on a series of international case studies, which each raise challenging questions that reach beyond merely cultural concerns and fully engage with both the legacies of colonial power inequalities and the shifting geopolitical dynamics of contemporary international relations. Cultural heritage embodies different values and can be instrumentalized to serve different economic, social and political objectives within development contexts, but the past is also intrinsic to the present and is foundational to people’s aspirations for the future. Museums, Heritage and International Development explores the problematics as well as potentials, the politics as well as possibilities, in this fascinating nexus.

We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’. The Inbetweenness of Things rejects such Western classificatory traditions – which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place and purpose – and argues instead for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another but a multiplicity of things at once.Adopting an ‘object-centred’ approach, with contributions from material culture specialists across various disciplines, the book showcases a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, it explores how ‘things’ mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody this mediation and movement in their form. With an impressive range of international authors, each essay grounds explorations of cutting-edge theory in concrete case studies.An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.

Exhibition Experiments is a lively collection that considers experiments with museological form that challenge our understanding of - and experience with - museums. Explores examples of museum experimentalism in light of cutting-edge museum theoryDraws on a range of global and topical examples, including museum experimentation, exhibitionary forms, the fate of conventional notions of ‘object’ and ‘representation’, and the impact of these changesBrings together an international group of art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to question traditional disciplinary boundariesConsiders the impact of technology on the museum spacetackles a range of examples of experimentalism from many different countries, including Australia, Austria, Germany, Israel, Luxembourg, Sweden, the UK and the USExamines the changes and challenging new possibilities facing museum studies

Exhibition Experiments is a lively collection that considers experiments with museological form that challenge our understanding of - and experience with - museums. Explores examples of museum experimentalism in light of cutting-edge museum theoryDraws on a range of global and topical examples, including museum experimentation, exhibitionary forms, the fate of conventional notions of ‘object’ and ‘representation’, and the impact of these changesBrings together an international group of art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to question traditional disciplinary boundariesConsiders the impact of technology on the museum spacetackles a range of examples of experimentalism from many different countries, including Australia, Austria, Germany, Israel, Luxembourg, Sweden, the UK and the USExamines the changes and challenging new possibilities facing museum studies

We habitually categorize the world in binary logics of ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’. The Inbetweenness of Things rejects such Western classificatory traditions – which tend to categorize objects using bounded notions of period, place and purpose – and argues instead for a paradigm where objects are not one thing or another but a multiplicity of things at once.Adopting an ‘object-centred’ approach, with contributions from material culture specialists across various disciplines, the book showcases a series of objects that defy neat classification. In the process, it explores how ‘things’ mediate and travel between conceptual worlds in diverse cultural, geographic and temporal contexts, and how they embody this mediation and movement in their form. With an impressive range of international authors, each essay grounds explorations of cutting-edge theory in concrete case studies.An innovative, thought-provoking read for students and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, museum studies and art history which will transform the way readers think about objects.

The first full-length ethnographic study of its kind, Highland Homecomings examines the role of place, ancestry and territorial attachment in the context of a modern age characterized by mobility and rootlessness.With an interdisciplinary approach, speaking to current themes in anthropology, archaeology, history, historical geography, cultural studies, migration studies, tourism studies, Scottish studies, Paul Basu explores the journeys made to the Scottish Highlands and Islands to undertake genealogical research and seek out ancestral sites.Using an innovative methodological approach, Basu tracks journeys between imagined homelands and physical landscapes and argues that through these genealogical journeys, individuals are able to construct meaningful self-narratives from the ambiguities of their diasporic migrant histories, and recover their sense of home and self-identity.This is a significant contribution to popular and academic Scottish studies literature, particularly appealing to popular and academic audiences in USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Scotland