Sandra H. Dudley – författare

Museum Objects provides a set of readings that together create a distinctive emphasis and perspective on the objects which lie at the heart of interpretive practice in museums, material culture studies and everyday life. This reader brings together classic and up to date texts on the nature and definition of the object itself, the senses and embodied experience of objects. No other volume brings together such perspectives in this way, and no other volume includes such a focus on the museum context. Museum Objects incorporates both theorised and more practical readings from a range of international academic and contextual perspectives. The overall result is a definitive set of readings that offers a comprehensive understanding of objects and their place within the museum context.

Museum Objects provides a set of readings that together create a distinctive emphasis and perspective on the objects which lie at the heart of interpretive practice in museums, material culture studies and everyday life. This reader brings together classic and up to date texts on the nature and definition of the object itself, the senses and embodied experience of objects. No other volume brings together such perspectives in this way, and no other volume includes such a focus on the museum context. Museum Objects incorporates both theorised and more practical readings from a range of international academic and contextual perspectives. The overall result is a definitive set of readings that offers a comprehensive understanding of objects and their place within the museum context.

Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories is a wide-ranging collection of essays exploring the stories that can be told by and about objects and those who choose to collect them. Examining objects and collecting in different historical, social and institutional contexts, an international, interdisciplinary group of authors consider the meanings and values with which objects are imputed and the processes and implications of collecting. This includes considering the entanglement of objects and collectors in webs of social relations, value and change, object biographies and the sometimes conflicting stories that things come to represent, and the strategies used to reconstruct and retell the narratives of objects. The book includes considerations of individual and groups of objects, such as domestic interiors, novelty tea-pots, Scottish stone monuments, African ironworking, a postcolonial painting and memorials to those killed on the roads in Australia. It also contains chapters dealing with particular collectors – including Charles Bell and Beatrix Potter – and representational techniques.

Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond looks anew at the lives, effects and possibilities of things. Starting from the perspectives of things themselves, it outlines a particular, displacement approach to the museum, anthropology and material culture.The book explores the ways in which the objects are experienced in their present, displaced settings, and the implications and potentialities they carry. It offers insights into matters of difference and the hope that may be offered by transformative encounters between persons and things. Drawing on anthropological studies of ritual to conceptualise and examine displacement and its implications and possibilities, Dudley develops her arguments through exploration of displaced objects now in museums and dislocated or exiled from their prior geographical, historical, cultural, intellectual and personal contexts. The book’s approach and conclusions are relevant far beyond the museum, showing that even in the most difficult of circumstances there is agency, distinction and dignity in the choices and impacts that are made, and that things and places as well as people have efficacy and potency in those choices. In Displaced Things, displacement emerges as fundamental to understanding the lives of things and their relationships with human beings, and the places, however defined, that they make and pass within. The book will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, anthropology, culture and history.

Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond looks anew at the lives, effects and possibilities of things. Starting from the perspectives of things themselves, it outlines a particular, displacement approach to the museum, anthropology and material culture.The book explores the ways in which the objects are experienced in their present, displaced settings, and the implications and potentialities they carry. It offers insights into matters of difference and the hope that may be offered by transformative encounters between persons and things. Drawing on anthropological studies of ritual to conceptualise and examine displacement and its implications and possibilities, Dudley develops her arguments through exploration of displaced objects now in museums and dislocated or exiled from their prior geographical, historical, cultural, intellectual and personal contexts. The book’s approach and conclusions are relevant far beyond the museum, showing that even in the most difficult of circumstances there is agency, distinction and dignity in the choices and impacts that are made, and that things and places as well as people have efficacy and potency in those choices. In Displaced Things, displacement emerges as fundamental to understanding the lives of things and their relationships with human beings, and the places, however defined, that they make and pass within. The book will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, anthropology, culture and history.