Emotion and the Contemporary Museum

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Museology, Cultural Geography, and the Non-representational

   • Candice P. Boyd, Rachel Hughes

   Pages 1-9

3. Exhibiting with Emotion

   • Candice P. Boyd, Rachel Hughes

   Pages 11-21

4. The Museo Laboratorio della Mente

   • Candice P. Boyd, Rachel Hughes

   Pages 23-50

5. WWI: Love and Sorrow Exhibition

   • Candice P. Boyd, Rachel Hughes

   Pages 51-76

6. Conclusion

   • Candice P. Boyd, Rachel Hughes

   Pages 77-87

7. Back Matter

   Pages 89-92

   PDF

This book outlines a geographically-informed method of evaluating the emotional impact of museum exhibits. The authors have personally developed the method they describe over several years of working with the Museo Laboratorio della Mente in Rome and the Melbourne Museum in Australia. Informed by non-representational theories in cultural geography, this book offers solutions to museum staff for how they might evaluate aspects of visitor experience, such as emotions and embodied experience, which can be very difficult to assess using conventional approaches.

• visitor evaluation
• affective museum display
• visual knowledge
• museum geographies
• non-representational theory

“Emotion and the Contemporary Museum brings clear and persuasive insights from non-representational theory into the realm of new museology. The volume refreshes our capacity to understand encounters with heritage and museums, achieved primarily through detailed reflections on the use of drawing and walking as methods of evaluation. Written with lucidity, and with an emphasis on depth and richness of data, Boyd and Hughes’ well-crafted collaboration should be required reading for anyone contemplating the contemporary museum.” (Associate Professor Emma Waterton, Western Sydney University, Australia)

• School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

  Candice P. Boyd, Rachel Hughes

Candice P. Boyd is an artist-geographer and Research Fellow in the School of Geography, University of Melbourne. Her interests are in therapeutic spaces, experiences of rurality, and contemporary museums. She is author of Non-Representational Geographies of Therapeutic Art Making and co-editor of Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts, both with Palgrave Macmillan.


Rachel Hughes is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her interests are public memory and museums in Cambodia, critical geopolitics, and geographies of international criminal justice. She is co-editor of Observant States with I.B. Tauris.

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