Curating Human Rights conceptualizes the human rights museum as a dynamic cultural-political genre that interacts with multiple social activist, state and corporate stakeholders. Drawing upon ethnographic and archival research on seven human rights museums in six countries, Ostow examines specifically what these museums do when they set out, or purport, to promote human rights. This includes the stories they visualize, display strategies, educational and other activities, internal structures, the way they position their visitors, the parameters of the human rights they address and the politics of pleasing their multiple stakeholders. The book also explores the contradictions and political and corporate pressure that contributes to foregrounding some human rights violations and ignoring or obscuring others. Ostow also examines the reactions to each museum in the local and national press, and by local visitors, politicians, donors and other stakeholders. The book ends with a discussion of the success and limitations of museums for promoting human rights, and policy recommendations to enhance their effectiveness. Curating Human Rights considers whether these museums are appropriate for, and effective at, promoting human rights - and if they address the pitfalls that have been identified. Curating Human Rights provides new perspectives on the field of human rights education and activism and will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, human rights, culture and communication.

Fact-finding is at the heart of human rights advocacy, and is often at the center of international controversies about alleged government abuses. In recent years, human rights fact-finding has greatly proliferated and become more sophisticated and complex, while also being subjected to stronger scrutiny from governments. Nevertheless, despite the prominence of fact-finding, it remains strikingly under-studied and under-theorized. Too little has been done to bring forth the assumptions, methodologies, and techniques of this rapidly developing field, or to open human rights fact-finding to critical and constructive scrutiny. The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of fact-finding with rigorous and critical analysis of the field of practice, while providing a range of accounts of what actually happens. It deepens the study and practice of human rights investigations, and fosters fact-finding as a discretely studied topic, while mapping crucial transformations in the field. The contributions to this book are the result of a major international conference organized by New York University Law School's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. Engaging the expertise and experience of the editors and contributing authors, it offers a broad approach encompassing contemporary issues and analysis across the human rights spectrum in law, international relations, and critical theory. This book addresses the major areas of human rights fact-finding such as victim and witness issues; fact-finding for advocacy, enforcement, and litigation; the role of interdisciplinary expertise and methodologies; crowd sourcing, social media, and big data; and international guidelines for fact-finding.

Climate change is a reality, and communities around the world are now facing significant environmental problems – rising global temperatures leading to increased risk of flooding, fire, and sea level rise, resulting in the destruction of property and social infrastructure, loss of biodiversity and tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and damage to economies. Little wonder then that the online conference held on 30 September 2021 with the title "Ecomuseums and Climate Action" attracted more than one hundred participants from countries whose communities are facing these problems. This book presents the results of this conference where heritage experts, community activists, curators, politicians and academics from several countries, explored how ecomuseums and community museums are acting as catalysts for transition, renewal, and sustainable development and how they might effectively contribute to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and climate action. How can these organisations best contribute to the debate about the climate crisis and promote local action? Central to those actions are encouraging local people to recognise how important their cultural, natural and intangible cultural heritage is in making places special and giving a sense of belonging, why that heritage should be sustained, and how heritage assets can be used to promote climate action. This book – with its remarkable collection of essays from around the world – demonstrates how small local actions, considered together, can have a dramatic and far-reaching impact. It will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in climate action, heritage and museum studies, and environmental issues.

Combining postcolonial studies, curating and contemporary art, this book surveys the role played by artistic curatorship and contemporary art museums in the shaping of identities and cultural planning in contemporary Iberia. The book’s main hypothesis is that contemporary art has been pivotal in the construction of contemporary Iberia, a process marked by the attention paid (in heterogeneous, not always satisfactory ways) to the entanglement of the legacies of colonialism and the present-day status of Iberian territories as cosmopolitan societies now integrated in the European Union. We argue that, at least from the 1990s, curating emerged as a key activity for Iberian societies to display and configure an image of themselves as modern and fully integrated in the European cultural landscape. Such an image, however, had to cope with the legacies of colonialism and the profound socioeconomic transformations of these societies. This book is concerned with bringing together, while redefining and expanding, Iberian and curatorial studies.

Curating Under Pressure breaks the silence surrounding curatorial self-censorship and shows that it is both endemic to the practice and ubiquitous. Contributors map the diverse forms such self-censorship takes and offer creative strategies for negotiating curatorial integrity. This is the first book to look at pressures to self-censor and the curatorial responses to these pressures from a wide range of international perspectives. The book offers examples of the many creative strategies that curators deploy to negotiate pressures to self-censor and gives evidence of curators’ political acumen, ethical sagacity and resilience over the long term. It also challenges the assumption that self-censorship is something to be avoided at all costs and suggests that a decision to self-censor may sometimes be politically and ethically imperative. Curating Under Pressure serves as a corrective to the assumption that censorship pressures render practitioners impotent. It demonstrates that curatorial practice under pressure offers inspiring models of agency, ingenuity and empowerment. Curating Under Pressure is a highly original and intellectually ambitious volume and as such will be of great interest to students and academics in the areas of museum studies, curatorial and gallery studies, art history, studio art and arts administration. The book will also be an essential tool for museum practitioners.

What makes curating feminist organizing? How do curators relate to contemporary feminist concerns in their local conditions and the globalized artworld? The book brings together twenty curatorial case studies from diverse regions of the globe. Reflecting their own curatorial projects or analyzing feminist-inspired exhibitions, the authors in this book elaborate feminist curating as that which is inspired to challenge gender politics not only within but also beyond the doors of the museum and gallery. Connecting their wider feminist politics to their curatorial practices, the book provides case studies of curatorial practice that address the legacies of racialized and ethnic violence, including colonialism; which seek to challenges the state's regulation of citizenship and sexuality; and which realize the drive for economic justice in the organizations and roles in which curators work. The settings in which this work is done range from university art galleries to artist-run spaces and educational or activist programmes. This collection will be enjoyed by those studying and researching curating, exhibitions, socially and ecologically engaged contemporary art practices, and feminist transnational movements in diverse geographic contexts. The essays are of relevance to practicing curators, critical cultural practitioners, and artists.

"This book offers a systematic overview of the responses made by museums and other repositories in the UK to the ownership, care, storage, display and interpretation of human remains." -- back cover.

Curating Art provides insight into some of the most socially and politically impactful curating of historical and contemporary art since the late 1990s. It offers up a museological framework for understanding watershed developments of curating in art museums. Representing the plurality of theory and practice around the expanded field of relational curating, the book focuses on curating that prioritises the quality of relationships between people and objects, between institutions and people and among people. It has wide international breadth, with particularly strong representation in East and Southeast Asia, including four papers never before translated into English. This Asian cluster illuminates the globalisation of the field and challenges dichotomies of East and West while acknowledging distinctions within specific, but often transnational, cultural spheres. The compelling philosophical perspectives and case studies included within Curating Art will be of interest to students and researchers studying curating, exhibition development and art museums. The book will also inspire current and emerging curators to pose challenging but important questions about their own practice and the relationships that this work sustains.

This volume inscribes an innovative domain of inquiry, bringing museum and heritage studies to bear on questions of transitional justice, memory and post-conflict reconciliation. As practitioners, artists, curators, activists and academics, the contributors explore the challenges of bearing witness to past conflicts.

This edited volume brings together the work of scholars from different disciplines including sociology, political science and anthropology, and analyses how global institutions are embedded in local contexts within development aid. It examines theoretical and empirical implications of the diffusion and anchoring of world polity institutions at the local and global levels. The volume furthers the understanding of the dynamics of norm negotiation and glocalization processes in culturally varied societies in an era of globalization. Themes and topics covered include: children and human rights, gender mainstreaming, multi-level actor partnerships, anti-corruption programming, local ownership, land rights and corporate social responsibility. Bringing together expert contributors, this comprehensive volume will be an invaluable resource for all scholars of localization and globalization studies, as well as those in the field of international relations.