A Two Day Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Symposium at the School of
Museum Studies, University of Leicester, March 27th-28th, 2012
In everyday life, the chance to dream, to imagine, to explore the idea
of the museum is limited, leaving many museums reacting to change,
rather than being able to think about how the museum could be. This
Symposium will give museum researchers, students and practitioners the
opportunity to consider the changes that are taking place in the world
and how museums might respond to them, using the idea of Utopia as a
place for dreaming as well as thinking practically about how these
challenges might be addressed. Despite the impossibility of building
Utopia, we arguably retain our need for what Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett (2004) has called ‘the utopian imagination’. Utopia can
inspire us to challenge the status quo, and to transform our world for
the better. From temples of the Muses dedicated to the arts to today’s
democratic forums of debate and consumption, the concept and the
realization of the museum have changed dramatically during its long
and varied history. Stepping into the Utopian otherworld enables us to
engage the past and present incarnations of the museum, both real and
imagined, and begin to navigate its future.
Papers are invited to address the following key themes, but we welcome
and encourage any creative or imaginative ideas that correspond with
the aims of the Symposium.
Please see the complete Call for Papers here: http://www.tinyurl.com/mutopia
