Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe. Opening up a New Field for Museum Studies

Buchvernissage und Vortrag in Englisch.

At a time of major transformation of the conditions and the self-conceptions of cultural history and ethnological museums world-wide, it has become increasingly important for these museums to engage in cooperative projects. This book brings together insights and analyses of a wide variety of approaches to museum cooperation from different expert perspectives. Featuring a variety of African and European points of view and providing detailed empirical evidence, it establishes a new field of museological study and provides some suggestions for future museum practice.

Lecture by Co-Author Rosalie Hans, Research Associate, University of Nottingham, UK: Local Museums ‒ Global Networks: Heritage and Development Discourse in the Zone of Contact

This talk will expand upon the chapter in the edited volume Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe, which discusses how the developments of local, independent and community-based museums are profoundly influenced by their national and international stakeholders. The proposed framework for understanding how ideas on museums, heritage and development are distributed along these networks is the zone of contact, a reconfiguration of the often used 'contact zone' in museums. Drawing on doctoral research conducted in Kenya and Uganda, the importance of acknowledging the pervasive discourses in the global heritage field is emphasised and its assumptions are challenged.