ProfessorAndrea Witcomb

Andrea's research interests range across the museum and heritage fields and are informed by theoretical, historical and professional practice concerns. She brings an interdisciplinary approach to her research, locating her work at the intersection of history, museology and cultural studies. Her interests include:

1) Theorising museum practice using cultural studies approaches to the study of exhibitions and the policy discourses that surround them.

2) Embedding these within an awareness of institutional practices and ethos, that is speaking from practice up to theoretical debates rather than the other way round.

3) Focussing on relations between museums and communities.

4) Focussing on the concept of interactivity, using this to understand the impact of current media culture on exhibition design and interpretation practices.

5) Undertaking research into the history of collecting practices in Australia, linking these to processes of colonisation and nation-making.

Her contribution to theorizing museums has been to create a parallel space to the governmentality approach informed by the work of Michel Foucault. She has developed an argument for museums as dialogic spaces which use a variety of interpretation strategies and curatorial practices to engage in conversation across difference. She has opened up a space in which museums can be thought of as spaces of potentiality rather than either hegemonic closure or consumed by instrumentalist forms of governmentality. She has done this along two main axis. The first is through studies of relations between museums and communities where she has looked at the representation of migration and cultural diversity (Witcomb 1998, 2003, 2009 and with Hutchison, 2013) and at the ways in which local museums respond to governmentalist agendas (Witcomb and Mauldon 1996, Witcomb 2003). The other has been to analyse the ways in which contemporary media culture has influenced interpretation strategies, either by creating spaces in which visitors can insert themselves into the exhibitions (Witcomb 1994, 2003, 2007) or, more recently, by exploring the connection between the use of multimedia and spaces for cross-cultural communication that aim to bridge cultural difference rather than emphasising the separation between groups around identity. In this context Andrea is interested in exploring affective experiences in museums and heritage sites either through the use of multimedia (Witcomb 2007, 2015, 2018), the art of installation (Witcomb and Gregory 2007) and through objects (2009, 2013, 2016). More recent work focuses on the history of collecting practices, with a particular focus on building connections between natural history and cultural collections, understanding the history of exchange as a mode of collecting practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and exploring the representation of gender within collections.