Veranstaltungsnr. 620505
Dozent Dr. Roland Meyer

Hours per Week per Semester 4
Credit Points 6

Date
Monday, 13:45 to 17:00, A/B
Friday, November 8, 2019 - 9:00 - 17:00 – Excursion
Friday, December 6, 2019 - 9:00 - 17:00 – Excursion
Friday, January 10, 2020 - 9:00 - 17:00 – Excursion
Friday, Januar 17, tbd – Excursion

Duration 14.10.2019 to 27.01.2019 
Location  LG 2A, Room U.18 – Main Campus

During the last decades, museums worldwide have undergone fundamental transformations. Their traditional core activities, the collection, preservation, research, and display of objects of historical and cultural significance, have been gradually supplemented by new functions. Increasingly, museums see themselves as urban cultural centres engaging in a broad range of activities, hosting diverse programs and events, allowing for new forms of participation and reaching out to local communities. Museums have become public places where people go not only to be educated and informed, but also to meet other people, take photographs, shop, dine or just to hang out. They also have become increasingly media-saturated places, offering a whole range of audiovisual, interactive and virtual experiences within their physical spaces, while providing new online services and extending their activities to the sphere of social media. Permanent collections of material objects, it seems, do no longer stand unquestioned at the center of the museum’s attention. No wonder, thus, that the question has already been asked: »Do Museums Still Need Objects?« (Steven Conn). 
The seminar takes this question as a starting point for an introduction into contemporary museological discussions concerning the future of the museum and the status of the museum object, focusing on the relationship between cultural memory, material culture and the aesthetic experience of authentic artifacts. Debates about cultural restitution and (post-) colonial legacies, which have gained prominence recently, will be of special importance – not least as they show that the question of the museum object is also a fundamentally political one.
 
Method
A close reading of canonical as well as recent texts from the fields of (new) museology, art history, cultural theory, and media studies will be accompanied by a series of field trips to museums in Cottbus, Berlin, and Dresden. Combining theoretical discussions and on-site experience, the course will enable the students to develop their own position towards the challenges museums are facing today and provide them with a critical vocabulary for analyzing and discussing museological concepts, exhibition strategies and modes of display.

Reader will be available via Moodle by the beginning of the course!

Course requirements
Regular attendance, field trips, presentation in the seminar, final paper, and while the whole term – willingness to discuss!