Museums, museology and cultural heritage studies in Sweden 1993–2017. Some experiences and effects

Abstract

In the last twenty-five years, the Swedish museum landscape has expanded and contains today several thousand museums, from the single local history museum to the merged governmental central museum, many of them organized in different networks. During the same period contemporary collecting, diversity issues and difficult matters became both attractive and urgent topics for the public cultural history museums. Also, museology and cultural heritage studies were established at several universities, with professorships as well as basic educational programmes. As a consequence, the perception of museology as research done at museums was replaced by research on museums, often with a critical view of the history of collections and exhibitions. During the last few years, however, a polarized media debate reveals that there might still be a gap between the actual, contemporary museum and the more traditional concept of the museum in (some) people’s minds.