The Victoria and Albert Museum

Whether measured by their expansive numbers worldwide, their collections and exhibitions, or their community-based mandates, public museums are familiar institutions from which the public asks much. Visitors seek pleasure and entertainment; they want access to objects and collections that provide them with knowledge in diverse areas, and an affirmation of a commitment to store and protect valued objects and stories. With an historical commitment to tangible material culture that represents the ‘authentic’ object, and a responsibility to provide lifelong learning through exhibition practices and programming, many museums are rethinking what they might be and what relationship they may have with their communities. In moving beyond being solely benign rooms full of objects and nostalgia for former national glories (Bennett, 1995), museums have restructured their collections, exhibition practices, and institutional mandates to increasingly invoke contemporary understandings about the contested nature of knowledge as well as addressing issues of social justice and democratic citizenship (Silverman, 2009).

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