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Voluntary DetoursSmall-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta |
eBook Available
Travelling the Alberta backroads to experience strange and wonderful collections that challenge assumptions about what museums are and what they can become.
After visiting hundreds of museums across Alberta, Lianne McTavish chronicles some of the most challenging and unexpected sites where the idea of the museum is being reshaped. The concept of the visit as a “voluntary detour” encapsulates the way visitors travel along backroads to find small-town and rural museums, as well as the agreement to turn away from standard museum scripts when they arrive.
Addressing themes of place, land, colonization, rurality, heritage, childhood, and play, McTavish reveals the museum visitor as multifaceted, with locals and tourists often interpreting museums very differently. Case studies include the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, and the Museum of Fear and Wonder. A key chapter analyzing sites devoted to resource extraction explores how these places promote settler colonial understandings of land use. By contrast, Indigenous museums and cultural centres defy colonial messages in displays that adapt and refuse conventional museum formats.
Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.
Addressing themes of place, land, colonization, rurality, heritage, childhood, and play, McTavish reveals the museum visitor as multifaceted, with locals and tourists often interpreting museums very differently. Case studies include the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, and the Museum of Fear and Wonder. A key chapter analyzing sites devoted to resource extraction explores how these places promote settler colonial understandings of land use. By contrast, Indigenous museums and cultural centres defy colonial messages in displays that adapt and refuse conventional museum formats.
Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.
Details
Part of the McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Series (number 34 in series)
360 Pages, 6.5 x 9.5
52 photos, 1 table, colour insert
ISBN 9780228008682
October 2021
Formats: Cloth, Paperback, eBook
"Voluntary Detours is a great book. Lianne McTavish writes about each museum with such a careful eye for detail that the exhibitions, founders, volunteers, and locations come vividly alive to the reader. She then develops these observations into wide-ranging critical arguments about people's practical, political, and emotional relationship to museums. This ability to combine description with cultural debate is itself a real skill; it is only because the writing is so lucid and elegant that she makes it looks easy." Fiona Candlin, Birkbeck, University of London, and author of Micromuseology: An Analysis of Small Independent Museums
“The first book to closely examine small-town and rural museums across Alberta, Voluntary Detours is an important contribution to critical museum studies. Indebted to the work of Fiona Candlin on micromuseums in the UK, the book addresses a selection of institutions that have been underexamined in Alberta, an oversight which has contributed to the sense that large urban museums are supposedly superior.” RACAR
“The first book to closely examine small-town and rural museums across Alberta, Voluntary Detours is an important contribution to critical museum studies. Indebted to the work of Fiona Candlin on micromuseums in the UK, the book addresses a selection of institutions that have been underexamined in Alberta, an oversight which has contributed to the sense that large urban museums are supposedly superior.” RACAR
Lianne McTavish is professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta.
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 3
1 Worth the Trip: Travel and the Evaluation of Small-Town and Rural Museums 39
2 Ghosts in the Museum: Haunted Histories at the Museum of Fear and Wonder 79
3 Middle of Nowhere: Contesting Rural Heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum 113
4 Encountering Oil and Water: The Politics of Play at Extraction Museums and Historic Sites 139
5 Unsettling the Pioneer: Learning from Indigenous Museums and Cultural Centres 174
Conclusion 212
Table and Figures 217
Notes 221
Index 281
Introduction 3
1 Worth the Trip: Travel and the Evaluation of Small-Town and Rural Museums 39
2 Ghosts in the Museum: Haunted Histories at the Museum of Fear and Wonder 79
3 Middle of Nowhere: Contesting Rural Heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum 113
4 Encountering Oil and Water: The Politics of Play at Extraction Museums and Historic Sites 139
5 Unsettling the Pioneer: Learning from Indigenous Museums and Cultural Centres 174
Conclusion 212
Table and Figures 217
Notes 221
Index 281
