The Politics of Display : Museums, Science, Culture

The assumption that museum exhibitions, particularly those concerned with science and technology, are somehow neutral and impartial is today being challenged both in the public arena and in the academy.

This title brings together studies of contemporary and historical exhibitions and contends that exhibitions are never, and never have been, above politics.

Rather, technologies of display and ideas about "science" and "objectivity" are mobilized to tell stories of progress, citizenship, racial and national difference.

The display of the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, is a well-known case in point.In addition, the book aims to chart the changing relationship between displays and their audience; to analyze the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive, multimedia and reflexive modes of display; and to bring together an array of international scholars in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and history.

Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology, industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine.

Locations include the United States of America.