Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod and Sheila Watson (eds), Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and are Changed

摘要

I started reading Museum Revolutions at the end of the university teaching term, as I was wrapping up tasks associated with a graduate course that familiarizes students with the techniques scholars use to design and undertake empirical and theoretical research.1 The course challenges students to rehearse and evaluate a range of interdisciplinary approaches to humanities research (from the perspectives of critical literary theory, anthropology, art history, law, archaeology and environmental studies, museum and cultural studies, history and criminology). Students come from a diverse range of fields although most are interested in exploring what this pluralistic and polyglot thing called interdisciplinary research is and how it might be adopted into their own research design and projects. Interdisciplinarity is about combining and adapting existing methods to develop new or alternative approaches to our research problems and questions, which may themselves be new or old. Being interdisciplinary is not about casually incorporating elements ‘pick and mix’ style, and it requires engaging with a field in a way that is discursively defensible. An interdisciplinary researcher is cognizant of the practices of multiple fields and can confidently employ certain tools, strategies and approaches on the grounds that they are best suited to their subject matter or because they might provide a way in which to extend or challenge the normalized boundaries of the discipline with which the researcher primarily identifies and to which they seek to contribute. The impulse to conduct interdisciplinary research occurs for many reasons. One compelling motivation is provided by historian and anthropologist Greg Dening, who recognized that interdisciplinary work can lead to new ways of understanding past events and peoples.2 Despite sharing some similarities with Foucault’s attention to genealogy, Dening promoted a ‘reflective’ approach to scholarly activity (whereby individual researchers adopt a self-conscious and empirical approach to their own scholarly activity) and expressed caution about theoretically-informed ‘reflexive’ approaches that aim to create challenging critiques of generalized disciplinary paradigms. Unpacking his motivations for a different kind of history-work, Dening explained: