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Within the historiography of post-war migration to Britain, many authors have used oral history to explore women’s history of migration to and their lived experiences in Britain. However, current historiographical attention to the Chinese in Britain neglects post-war experiences, particularly those of women, and is yet to engage with rich oral history collections. Drawing on the voices of twelve women, this paper argues that, against the backdrop of relaxing exit controls in post-1978 China, women utilised socioeconomic resources and navigated accessible routes for crossing regional and national borders, displaying their will and resilience to use migration as a means of personal development, and, in some cases, showed pragmatism in seeking to emigrate. This paper expands the historiography of Chinese migration to Britain and adds to our understanding of gender and migration. It indicates that, despite their seeking personal development, Chinese women’s migration was conditioned by family responsibilities, and their narratives of migration incorporated consideration of family members. It highlights how changing policies in China enabled and motivated women’s migration to and permanent settlement in Britain. Teasing out these rationales helps us to rethink the history of ethnic minorities in Britain, moving beyond a (post)imperial framing.

Museum visitor preference for the physical properties of 3D printed replicas

Digital images in museums: Digital desires: What are museums up to?

This introduction explores the concept of migration and the contested nature of Britishness. The aim of the book is to explain famous and obscure migration to Britain, which includes migrants who were denied entry or those who have passed through only briefly, and groups who were allowed permanent settlement in Britain. The book discusses the history of British migration and presents eight case studies from the seventeenth century onwards. It explores how race, religion, ethnicity, place, gender, age and class are utilised in selecting which groups are granted or denied entry to the nation's borders.

This article investigates the idea of activating the space in between museum visitors and objects on display through a design approach that integrates spatial and material aspects of museum vitrine design. The article begins with an analysis of contemporary artworks by Damien Hirst and art duo benandsebastian that critically explore museum vitrine aesthetics and then proceeds to an analysis of experimental vitrine designs made for the purpose of the present study. The primary spatial logic of the conventional museum vitrine reflects the need to keep curious fingers and dust away from precious objects and regulate objects’ exposure to climatic conditions. The experimental designs challenge this basic function of separating visitor from display object, however they do so without simply eliminating this separation, as suggested by many museum scholars who advocate direct touch and object handling in the museum. Rather, the experimental vitrine designs work with the productive tension between separation and continuity, vision and touch, and the resultant senses of distance and proximity. Through this experimental work, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh has served as the main conceptual driver. “Flesh” is described as a “thickness” and “a means of communication” between body and world and will be used to capture and talk about how vitrines can activate the space in between museum visitor and objects on display.

How many times have we, the museum visitor, stood in front of a display case full of objects and let our eyes glance over them, not really taking in any of them individually? Not understanding why they were grouped as they are, or bothering to read the labels that the curator has painstakingly written and positioned? This is the challenge of temporary (and permanent) exhibitions displays today in our fast moving, social media savvy world. Museum objects have to work hard to be noticed and appreciated. Taking an object out of its ‘natural environment’ is always artificial, even if the museum goes to great lengths to replicate the environment that it would have been used in (e.g. with ‘room sets’). This is particularly the case with functional (and often decorative) objects, like cups and saucers, hosiery, jewellery, barometers, balls of twine or an egg timer. Once they are placed in a case, their use alters. They are elevated far beyond their original function. They become an ‘object’ to be admired, looked at with interest, or with indifference. They have the power to fascinate and inspire. But to do that, they must first be displayed in a way that shows them off advantageously and with interpretation that explains their importance and use without boring or confusing the reader. Add to this an often complex message that the museum wishes to convey to the visitors, and curators really have their work cut out. This was the challenge that I faced when I curated the Enlightenment exhibition at Derby Museums (22 June–25 August 2013). This exhibition was the result of five years of collecting by ourselves, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery and Strutt’s North Mill, Belper. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund Collecting Cultures programme, we collected over 100 eighteenth-century objects to enrich our collections, to develop a better understanding of the Enlightenment period in Derbyshire and to help put the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritages Site into context. So although I and the collections team were in raptures over a plate showing a peculiar looking polar bear and were discussing how this one item could be linked to trade, exploitation, fashion, taste, travel and a fascination with natural history, my challenge was how to display this object so the museum’s visitors were excited by it too.

What do preschool children value about museums, and how can we find out? This case study focused on children of preschool age (three and four years) who were already experienced visitors to our UK art museum. They were given a cuddly toy to take on a guided tour of the museum in order for them to highlight what they considered key objects and features. This enabled many rich and in-depth conversations between the children, their parents and the researcher. The children were also invited to draw - about their museum visits - and parents were interviewed to give their perspectives on their children’s museum experiences. Analysis of the children’s talk revealed that they valued many different aspects of the experience of visiting the museum – not just the activities and resources specifically designed for families - and displayed a good deal of ‘museum literacy’ in addition to carrying out sophisticated analyses of particular objects. The study calls for greater focus on this age group in museum education, particularly through research led by practitioners, who observe on a daily basis how young children express their relationships with museum objects, and who have a wealth of local experiences which could be developed through thoughtfully planned action research.

It seems nowadays that any aspect of collecting and displaying tangible or intangible material culture is labeled as curating: shopkeepers curate their wares; DJs curate their musical selections; magazine editors curate media stories; and hipsters curate their coffee tables. Given the increasing ubiquity and complexity of 21st-century notions of curatorship, the current issue of MC Journal, ‘curate’, provides an excellent opportunity to consider some of the changes that have occurred in professional practice since the emergence of the ‘digital turn’. There is no doubt that the internet and interactive media have transformed the way we live our daily lives—and for many cultural commentators it only makes sense that they should also transform our cultural experiences. In this paper, I want to examine the issue of curatorial practice in the postdigital age, looking some of the ways that curating has changed over the last twenty years—and some of the ways it has not. The term postdigital comes from the work of Ross Parry, and is used to references the ‘tipping point’ where the use of digital technologies became normative practice in museums (24). Overall, I contend that although new technologies have substantially facilitated the way that curators do their jobs, core business and values have not changed as the result of the digital turn. While, major paradigm shifts have occurred in the field of professional curatorship over the last twenty years, these shifts have been issue-driven rather than a result of new technologies. Everyone’s a Curator In a 2009 article in the New York Times, journalist Alex Williams commented on the growing trend in American consumer culture of labeling oneself a curator. “The word ‘curate’,’’ he observed, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting” (1). Williams dated the origins of the popular adoption of the term ‘curating’ to a decade earlier; noting the strong association between the uptake and the rise of the internet (2). This association is not surprising. The development of increasingly interactive software such as Web 2.0 has led to a rapid rise in new technologies aimed at connecting people and information in ways that were previously unimaginable. In particular the internet has become a space in which people can collect, store and most importantly share vast quantities of information. This information is often about objects. According to sociologist Jyri Engeström, the most successful social network sites on the internet (such as Pinterest, Flickr, Houzz etc), use discrete objects, rather than educational content or interpersonal relationships, as the basis for social interaction. So objects become the node for inter-personal communication. In these and other sites, internet users can find, collate and display multiple images of objects on the same page, which can in turn be connected at the press of a button to other related sources of information in the form of text, commentary or more images. These sites are often seen as the opportunity to virtually curate mini-exhibitions, as well as to create mood boards or sites of virtual consumption. The idea of curating as selective aesthetic editing is also popular in online markets places such as Etsy where numerous sellers offer ‘curated’ selections from home wares, to prints, to (my personal favorite) a curated selection of cat toys. In all of these exercises there is an emphasis on the idea of connoisseurship. As part of his article on the new breed of ‘curators’, for example, Alex Williams interviewed Tom Kalendrain, the Fashion Director of a leading American department store, which had engaged in a collaboration with Scott Schuman of the fashion blog, the Sartorialist. According to Kalendrain the store had asked Schuman to ‘curate’ a collection of clothes for them to sell. He justified calling Schuman a curator by explaining: “It was precisely his eye that made the store want to work with him; it was about the right shade of blue, about the cut, about the width of a lapel” (cited in Williams 2). The interview reveals much about current popular notions of what it means to be a curator. The central emphasis of Kalendrain’s distinction was on connoisseurship: exerting a privileged authoritative voice based on intimate knowledge of the subject matter and the ability to discern the very best examples from a plethora of choices. Ironically, in terms of contemporary museum practice, this is a model of curating that museums have consciously been trying to move away from for at least the last three decades. We are now witnessing an interesting disconnect in which the extra-museum community (represented in particular by a postdigital generation of cultural bloggers, commentators and entrepreneurs) are re-vivifying an archaic model of curating, based on object-centric connoisseurship, just at the point where professional curators had thought they had successfully moved on. From Being about Something to Being for Somebody The rejection of the object-expert model of curating has been so persuasive that it has transformed the way museums conduct core business across all sectors of the institution. Over the last thirty to forty years museums have witnessed a major pedagogical shift in how curators approach their work and how museums conceptualise their core values. These paradigmatic and pedagogical shifts were best characterised by the museologist Stephen Weil in his seminal article “From being about something to being for somebody.” Weil, writing in the late 1990s, noted that museums had turned away from traditional models in which individual curators (by way of scholarship and connoisseurship) dictated how the rest of the world (the audience) apprehended and understood significant objects of art, science and history—towards an audience centered approach where curators worked collaboratively with a variety of interested communities to create a pluralist forum for social change. In museum parlance these changes are referred to under the general rubric of the ‘new museology’: a paradigm shift, which had its origins in the 1970s; its gestation in the 1980s; and began to substantially manifest by the 1990s. Although no longer ‘new’, these shifts continue to influence museum practices in the 2000s. In her article, “Curatorship as Social Practice’” museologist Christina Kreps outlined some of the developments over recent decades that have challenged the object-centric model. According to Kreps, the ‘new museology’ was a paradigm shift that emerged from a widespread dissatisfaction with conventional interpretations of the museum and its functions and sought to re-orient itself away from strongly method and technique driven object-focused approaches. “The ‘new museum’ was to be people-centered, action-oriented, and devoted to social change and development” (315). An integral contributor to the developing new museology was the subjection of the western museum in the 1980s and ‘90s to representational critique from academics and activists. Such a critique entailed, in the words of Sharon Macdonald, questioning and drawing attention to “how meanings come to be inscribed and by whom, and how some come to be regarded as ‘right’ or taken as given” (3). Macdonald notes that postcolonial and feminist academics were especially engaged in this critique and the growing “identity politics” of the era. A growing engagement with the concept that museological /curatorial work is what Kreps (2003b) calls a ‘social process’, a recognition that; “people’s relationships to objects are primarily social and cultural ones” (154). This shift has particularly impacted on the practice of museum curatorship. By way of illustration we can compare two scholarly definitions of what constitutes a curator; one written in 1984 and one from 2001. The Manual of Curatorship, written in 1994 by Gary Edson and David Dean define a curator as: “a staff member or consultant who is as specialist in a particular field on study and who provides information, does research and oversees the maintenance, use, and enhancement of collections” (290). Cash Cash writing in 2001 defines curatorship instead as “a social practice predicated on the principle of a fixed relation between material objects and the human environment” (140). The shift has been towards increased self-reflexivity and a focus on greater plurality–acknowledging the needs of their diverse audiences and community stakeholders. As part of this internal reflection the role of curator has shifted from sole authority to cultural mediator—from connoisseur to community facilitator as a conduit for greater community-based conversation and audience engagement resulting in new interpretations of what museums are, and what their purpose is. This shift—away from objects and towards audiences—has been so great that it has led some scholars to question the need for museums to have standing collections at all. Do Museums Need Objects? In his provocatively titled work Do Museums Still Need Objects? Historian Steven Conn observes that many contemporary museums are turning away from the authority of the object and towards mass entertainment (1). Conn notes that there has been an increasing retreat from object-based research in the fields of art; science and ethnography; that less object-based research seems to be occurring in museums and fewer objects are being put on display (2). The success of science centers with no standing collections, the reduction in the number of objects put on display in modern museums (23); the increasing phalanx of ‘starchitect’ designed museums where the building is more important than the objects in it (11), and the increase of virtual museums and collections online, all seems to indicate that conventional museum objects have had their day (1-2). Or have th

This study investigated the effect of nostalgia on museum visitors’ memories of life episodes from the distant past following their encounters with museum objects they remembered from earlier stages of their lives. The study sought to understand how the vividness of these memories and the affect of such memories in the present day were related to nostalgia and other psychological factors. A total of 87 participants who had visited one of three different social history museums located in Japan were recruited for the study. A total of 253 separate memory episodes were obtained from the participants, who were asked to rate the strength of several psychological factors associated with the memories triggered by the museum exhibits. A conceptual model in which nostalgia mediated psychological factors was tested through structural equation modeling. The results revealed that the nostalgia evoked by life episodes completely mediated the effects of the vividness of one’s memory of those episodes recalled in the present. Furthermore, there was also some evidence of a similar mediation on one’s emotional affect associated with life episodes in the present day.

Based on a descriptive phenomenological research design, this study investigated Turkish elementary school students' experiences in learning social studies via objects in museums. After students visited four different museums during the teaching of three thematic units at sixth grade level, their lived experiences were elicited. Purposeful sampling was used to select the research participants and interviews were employed to gather data. The research data were analyzed by means of Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological framework, which helped reveal the structure of the phenomenon of learning social studies in museums. It was found that the essence of learning social studies via objects in museums consisted of five components. These were (1) excitement and motivation to learn about the past, (2) active participation in the learning process, (3) reconstruction of historical knowledge with the development of historical thinking skills, (4) enjoying social studies learning, and (5) heightened interest in social studies and seeing it as a valuable school subject. It was also found that some students had difficulties or negative learning experiences in their museum visits, such as difficulty in asking object-based questions or making comments on objects and relating them to the lessons being studied in the class. Because only a few students mentioned these difficulties, they were not included in the essence of the lived experience of learning social studies via objects in museums.

The Ways that Digital Technologies Inform Visitor's Engagement with Cultural Heritage Sites: Informal Learning in the Digital Era

In this paper, we present our ongoing research on capture and processing of location logs of visitors in museum. We introduce importance of logging visitors' locations in museum, and comparisons of various localization techniques developed so far. Among the techniques potentially available, we focus on image-based localization: the visitor capture images of the objects in museum which is of his/her interest, then the images are compared to the image dataset which includes location tags, and find the possible locations of the user. We will present our preliminary experiments of the results of the image-based localization, which we have done in the Railway Museum of Japan. Capturing images during the visit finally results in the location logs of the visitor which benefit each individual and the museum.

120 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 OTHER TALES: MUSEUM OBJECTS AND THE ENGENDERING OF JEWISH KNOWLEDGE by Paula Chaiken Paula Chaiken is the Education Coordinator at the Spenus Museum ofJudaica, Chicago. She also teaches a course on gender and Judaism to high-school students. "What can you tell me about this object?" I asked the group of high school students visiting Spenus Museuml from a Reform congregation in Chicago's northern suburbs as we stopped in front of an 18th century North African Torah scroll. A student described the Torah's appearance, explained its contents and discussed how it may have been used in communal worship long ago. "And what is special about the way in which a Torah is produced?" I asked. The students explained how a Torah is written with a quill and naturally-produced ink on parchment made from the hide of a kosher animal by a soler, a professional scribe. I elaborated, "The scribe works for a very long time to create a Torah. He may spend years working on one, as it has to be perfect." One boy looked puzzled. He was upset by my choice of pronoun and asked, "Does the scribe have to be a man?" "Well," I hesitated. "Traditionally, the soler is a man. Though there are many talented female scribes who write ketubbot (marriage contracts), I don't know of any recorded instances of a Torah having been written by a woman." 'Spertus Museum, Chicago, Illinois, is the largest Jewish Museum in the midwest. Its Judaica collection includes objects from 5,000 years ofJewish life, as well as the Bernard and Rochelle Zell Holocaust Memorial; The Paul and Gabriella Rosenbaum ARTiFACT Center, a hands-on children's archeological museum; and temporary exhibitions illustratingJewish art, history and culture. Other Tales: Museum Objects 121 His question sent us on a new journey. We had not set out to talk about the roles ofmen and women inJudaism but the museum experience made it possible. We continued our tour guided by the question. We came to a case containing another Torah from Westphalia, Germany in the late nineteenth-century. There was no synagogue there, so Moses and Zipporah Pagener housed the community Torah in their home. I explained how Zipporah Pagener had wanted to keep the Torah in a special place so she donated the finest cloth available, her wedding dress, to serve as a parokhet, a Torah ark curtain. The students heard this story as they looked at the piece of wedding dress. .As we admired the parokhet, one student asked, "How do we know Mrs. Pagener wanted to donate her dress?" "We don't," I answered honestly. And I thought to myself, "This is the difficult part. .As museum Visitors, we have the power to make the objects tell stories, which means we generally make them tell the stories we want to hear." I preferred to believe that Zipporah had chosen to give her dress out of love and commitment to the Jewish community because I don't want to believe that someone else made the choice for her. .As a group we pondered the question: Did Zipporah choose to give up her finest dress to cover the Torah or did she watch passively as her husband decided the Torah ought to be dressed better than she was? .As we arrived in front of the case filled with objects used on Shabbat the students felt confident that they understood women's obligations concerning the Jewish day of rest. "My mom lights the Shabbat candles every Friday," one girl called out. I told her that her mother is observing one of three mitzvot (commandments ) that women perform: lighting Shabbat candles, taking hallah (setting aside and burning a piece of the dough as a reminder of providing sustenance for the Temple priests) and going to the mikveh.2 Her friend commented that all of the pairs of candle holders in the case-from Poland, Israel, England-probably held candles which were lit by women in Jewish communities throughout the world. "And polished by them, too," I commented as we noticed the brass and silver. We arrived at the life-cycle section of the...

The purpose of the research. Important conditions for success of a museum are a competently built-up management system and consistent attraction activities designed for different types of target audience. The article analyses the structure of attraction activities in Ukraine’s transport museums compared to that of New York State museums. The methodology of the research. The museum visitors were interviewed, the content of the museums’ websites and testimonials was analyzed. The focus was on the description of the museums’ exposition, dramaturgy, types of attraction policy and activities for various types of target audience. Comparison of opportunities for actualizing the attraction potential of transport museums in Ukraine and New York State was made. Based on the analysis, a method of increasing their popularity was deduced. The scientific novelty lies in adaptation of attraction strategies of the US transport museums to Ukraine’s realia. For the first time, the factors of influence on the audience from attraction events in transport museums in Ukraine and the US (on the example of the state of New York) have been systematized. Conclusions. Methods of museum space theatricalization and animation in transport museums of the US have been analyzed. Based on that, an algorithm of actions for Ukraine transport museums have been deduced. There is a need to consider means of attracting financial resources and museum volunteering to the museum space. The issue of practical realization of this task by museum workers in the realia of post-soviet cultural space has been raised. Experimental modelling of an attraction events program in Ukraine’s existing transport museums may approbate the results of the research.

Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites is framed by educational psychoanalytic theory and positions museum workers, public historians, and museum visitors as learners. Through this lens, museum workers and public historians can develop compelling and ethical representations of historical individuals, communities, and populations who have suffered. It includes various examples of difficult knowledge, detailed examples of specific interpretation methods, and will give readers an in-depth explanation of the psychoanalytic educational theories behind the methodologies. Audiences can more responsibly and productively engage in learning histories of oppression and trauma when they are in measured and sensitive museum learning environments and public history venues. To learn more, check out the website here: http://interpretingdifficulthistory.com/