Edition Museum - Böcker

Museums increasingly digitize collections to expand public access and foster engagement beyond institutional spaces. Katharina Geis explores how digital museum images are used, shared, and curated across platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Drawing on ethnographic research – including participant observation and 90 interviews – she examines how digital infrastructures and social contexts shape curation practices. By tracing how users search for, edit, and share images, the study reveals how digital image curation becomes a way of knowing about, with, and through artefacts in everyday life.

How do participatory museum projects with forced migrants impact both the museum and the participants? What happens during these projects and what is left of them afterwards? Based on interviews with museum practitioners, facilitators and project participants, Susanne Boersma brings together unique insights into museum work with forced migrants. Her study of participatory projects in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK reveals museums' limiting infrastructures, the shortcomings of their ethical frameworks, and the problems of addressing forced migrants as 'communities'. Outlining the diverging objectives, experiences and outcomes of participatory projects, she suggests how these might be united in practice.

Care has become a trend in the art field, but much of the recent curatorial focus seems to be limited to symbolic gestures through exhibitions and public programming. These efforts, however, have led to few (infra)structural changes. The need remains for bringing about fair working conditions, gender equity, and support structures for caregivers and care-receivers. In response, Sascia Bailer redefines »curatorial care« as an infrastructural practice grounded in feminist care ethics that provides »care for presence« for diverse audiences. Drawing from socially engaged curatorial and artistic practices, she offers hands-on propositions for constructing caring infrastructures and provides a micro-political roadmap for curating with care.

Exhibitions, as constructed cultural dispositions, media of showing, and processes of social interaction, hold great interest for cultural analysis. Being able to analyze exhibitions is a skill that allows us to critically examine exhibitions as public places regarding their effects and uses, and to change them as a result. The contributions to this volume present nineteen methods of exhibition analysis from the perspective of cultural analysis, perception studies and practice-oriented work. They locate these methods in the context of their respective discourses and present them in step-by-step guidelines for hands-on application, thus providing the first compilation on exhibition analysis for research, teaching and museum practice.