Museum Utopias: Navigating the Imaginary, Ideal and Possible Museum

A Two Day Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Symposium at the School of
Museum Studies, University of Leicester Tuesday 27th and Wednesday
28th March 2012

In everyday life, the chance to dream, to imagine, to explore the idea
of the museum is limited, leaving many museums reacting to change,
rather than being able to think about how the museum could be. This
Symposium will give museum researchers, students and practitioners the
opportunity to consider the changes that are taking place in the world
and how museums might respond to them, using the idea of Utopia as a
place for dreaming as well as thinking practically about how these
challenges might be addressed.
Despite the impossibility of building Utopia, we arguably retain our
need for what Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett (2004) has called ‘the
utopian imagination’. Utopia can inspire us to challenge the status
quo, and to transform our world for the better. From temples of the
Muses dedicated to the arts to today’s democratic forums of debate and
consumption, the concept and the realization of the museum have
changed dramatically during its long and varied history. Stepping into
the Utopian otherworld enables us to engage the past and present
incarnations of the museum, both real and imagined, and begin to
navigate its future.

Papers are invited to address the following key themes, but we welcome
and encourage any creative or imaginative ideas that correspond with
the aims of the Symposium.

Please see the complete Call for Papers here: http://www.tinyurl.com/mutopia

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