Placing the Museum: Toward Museum Geography

Geographers are increasingly contributing to understanding the multiple functions museums serve, much like their colleagues in history, anthropology, and museum studies. In her 2010 article "Museum Geography: Exploring Museums, Collections and Museum Practice in the UK," Hilary Geoghegan writes, "Museums and collections offer geographers exciting sites and subjects for research and teachings [and] that it is now time to consider museum geography more closely" (p. 1472). Heeding her call, this set of sessions is designed to serve as a conversation space to consider recent scholarship by geographers and others interested in the social spaces of museums. New and career scholars as well as non-academic museum stakeholders will participate in this set of sessions designed to consider 1) the changing roles of museums in various geographical settings, 2) the shifting challenges ­ legal, economic and issues of diversity ­faced by museums 3) analysis of the adoption of new forms of representation and embodiment at specific sites.