Andrea Witcomb
Biographic Data
| ID | 815326 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrea Witcomb |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrea |
| FAMILY NAME | Witcomb |
| SIGNATURE | WITCOMB A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9128-2896 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Scale, stillness and the migrant subject
Migration traverses a number of scales – the geopolitical scale of immigrant numbers, the scale of settlements, and the intimate ontological scale of human agency and subjectivity. It would be mistaken to consider these as separate autonomous entities of scale; indeed, their forces and entanglement underpin the construction of migrant subjectivities. This article, in a special issue of Landscape Research devoted to an analysis of the Immigrant Ne…
Connecting Collections
Australia's vast collections of biological, natural history, ethnographic, and social-historical materials remain largely disconnected from each other and from the public. Connecting these distributed collections, currently dispersed in local, state, national, and global locales, is critically important to generate new knowledge for national and global benefit. The vision of making these collections accessible at scale, alongside innovative metho…
Nature’s Marvels”
The history of collecting in Western Australia demonstrates some unique as well as exemplary features that we suggest can illuminate aspects of collecting more broadly. This article seeks to contribute to scholarship on the history of collecting by arguing for the importance of understanding the ways in which the value of collections—to collectors, institutions and knowledge producers—has been produced. We call this focus on value an extractive v…
Comprendre le rôle de l’affect dans la création d’une pédagogie critique pour les musées d’histoire
S’il est indéniable que certaines expositions non critiques renforcent des récits nostalgiques du passé, cet article cherche à démontrer l’existence d’expositions critiques et à expliciter leurs ressorts. On analyse la façon dont la production de formes d’expérience affective et non rationnelle visant à induire un plus grand engagement de la part des visiteurs est utilisée pour faciliter une réflexion plus critique sur le rapport entre le passé e…
Practising lively geographies in the city
This article explores diverse ways of experiencing the city through an experimental field-based workshop supported by the Institute of Australian Geographers and this journal. The two-day methods practice workshop attracted 40 participants and aimed to train doctoral students and early career researchers in practices of observing, feeling, listening, mapping and visualizing the city. This paper aims to demonstrate how learning new methods that in…
Port Arthur and the spectre of ‘unnatural acts’ in Australia
Heritage penal landscapes are complex sites, dealing with histories of brutality while reassuring the public that criminals can be made safe. In Australia, the terrain is highly complex given the founding of the nation as a penal colony to take the human refuse of Britain. This history, historians argue, raised the spectre of the long-term legacy of the ‘convict stain’, an idea they argue is a legacy of the ‘anti-sodomitical’ hysteria associated …
Hidden from view
‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big …
Collections without End
The discovery of five photographs in 2018 in the State Library of Western Australia led us to the existence of a forgotten private museum housing the collection of Captain Matthew McVicker Smyth in early-twentieth-century Perth. Captain Smyth was responsible for the selling of Nobel explosives used in the agriculture and mining industries. The museum contained mineral specimens in cases alongside extensive, aesthetically organized displays of Aus…
Remembering and Fighting for Their Own
On the third anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan on 18 August 1969, a simple but distinctive concrete cross was planted on the site of the battle to remember the eighteen Australian lives lost. The memorial cross was later toppled, lost and recovered but its physical form was never forgotten. In Australia, veterans made it a focus for their commemoration of all who served and died in the Vietnam War, replicating it across the country. This arti…
Museum Theory
This chapter presents a theoretical framework and justification for the volume's broader aim of devising and showcasing critical perspectives on the museum (as an institution) and on museums (as a series of individual specificities and contingencies) from a range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. We approach this task from the proposition that museum theory cannot be divorced from museum practice, arguing that museums are best understo…
Understanding the role of affect in producing a critical pedagogy for history museums
n\t\t\t\t\tWhile the existence of uncritical exhibition practices that support nostalgic narratives about the past cannot be denied, this paper is focused on demonstrating both the existence of critical exhibitions and on explaining how they work. In particularly, this paper looks at the ways in which the production of affective, nonrational forms of experience aimed at inducing a heightened level of engagement on the part of visitors is being us…
Engaging with the future of 'critical heritage studies
This article engages with the Association for Critical Heritage Studies Manifesto which argues that heritage studies is in need of a complete renovation. We do so by looking back to two earlier moments. The first when museum studies also called for a renovation, drawing on those experiences as potentially instructive for the immediate future of heritage studies. The second a debate within cultural studies on the value of engagement with the world…
Books
There is no more imposing figure in the history of Australian anthropology than W.E.H. ('Bill') Stanner (1905-1981). While some of his contemporaries produced more ethnography, none matched his skill and eloquence in describing the life-worlds of Aboriginal people. While others of his age were just as closely involved in arguing for the defensibility of Aboriginal society, none did so with such convincing passion. With these two legacies in mind,…
Migration, social cohesion and cultural diversity
The politics surrounding the representation of notions of community in Australian museums and heritage sites has long centred on tensions around the representation of migration history. For, at the heart of differing models of migration history are different understandings of national identity and citizenship. That this is so in Australia should not be surprising. After all, we are a settler culture, born of the British Empire in the first instan…
The Materiality of Virtual Technologies
This chapter examines the display of objects alongside digital media in museum exhibitions through an analysis of interpretive approaches and forms of narrative construction. It argues that existing discussions about the impact of multimedia in museums are typically based on an opposition between the virtual and the material world, and thus interpret the virtual either as a threat or as a radical process of democratization. The chapter offers a d…
Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory
Re-Imagining the Museum
Re-Imagining the Museum presents new interpretations of museum history and contemporary museum practices. Through a range of case studies from the UK, North America and Australia, Andrea Witcomb moves away from the idea that museums are always 'conservative' to suggest they have a long history of engaging with popular culture and addressing a variety of audiences. She argues that museums are key mediators between high and popular culture and betw…
Beyond the Mausoleum
Much of the discussion of the impact of electronic technologies on museums suggests that electronic technologies have been important in displacing the traditional metaphor of museums as mausoleums. This paper supports the move away from this metaphor, but suggests that this is not a recent phenomenon or entirely attributable to the impact of electronic technologies. The rhetorics currently associated with electronic technologies in museums can be…
On the Side of the Object
(1997). On the Side of the Object: an Alternative Approach to Debates About Ideas, Objects and Museums. Museum Management and Curatorship: Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 383-399
Postmodern space and the museum—the displacement of ‘public’ narratives
Understanding the role of affect in producing a critical pedagogy for history museums
n\t\t\t\t\tWhile the existence of uncritical exhibition practices that support nostalgic narratives about the past cannot be denied, this paper is focused on demonstrating both the existence of critical exhibitions and on explaining how they work. In particularly, this paper looks at the ways in which the production of affective, nonrational forms of experience aimed at inducing a heightened level of engagement on the part of visitors is being us…
Engaging with the future of 'critical heritage studies
This article engages with the Association for Critical Heritage Studies Manifesto which argues that heritage studies is in need of a complete renovation. We do so by looking back to two earlier moments. The first when museum studies also called for a renovation, drawing on those experiences as potentially instructive for the immediate future of heritage studies. The second a debate within cultural studies on the value of engagement with the world…
Hidden from view
‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big …
On the Side of the Object
(1997). On the Side of the Object: an Alternative Approach to Debates About Ideas, Objects and Museums. Museum Management and Curatorship: Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 383-399
Practising lively geographies in the city
This article explores diverse ways of experiencing the city through an experimental field-based workshop supported by the Institute of Australian Geographers and this journal. The two-day methods practice workshop attracted 40 participants and aimed to train doctoral students and early career researchers in practices of observing, feeling, listening, mapping and visualizing the city. This paper aims to demonstrate how learning new methods that in…
Port Arthur and the spectre of ‘unnatural acts’ in Australia
Heritage penal landscapes are complex sites, dealing with histories of brutality while reassuring the public that criminals can be made safe. In Australia, the terrain is highly complex given the founding of the nation as a penal colony to take the human refuse of Britain. This history, historians argue, raised the spectre of the long-term legacy of the ‘convict stain’, an idea they argue is a legacy of the ‘anti-sodomitical’ hysteria associated …
Scale, stillness and the migrant subject
Migration traverses a number of scales – the geopolitical scale of immigrant numbers, the scale of settlements, and the intimate ontological scale of human agency and subjectivity. It would be mistaken to consider these as separate autonomous entities of scale; indeed, their forces and entanglement underpin the construction of migrant subjectivities. This article, in a special issue of Landscape Research devoted to an analysis of the Immigrant Ne…
Beyond the Mausoleum
Much of the discussion of the impact of electronic technologies on museums suggests that electronic technologies have been important in displacing the traditional metaphor of museums as mausoleums. This paper supports the move away from this metaphor, but suggests that this is not a recent phenomenon or entirely attributable to the impact of electronic technologies. The rhetorics currently associated with electronic technologies in museums can be…
Postmodern space and the museum—the displacement of ‘public’ narratives
Postmodern space and the museum—the displacement of ‘public’ narratives
On the Side of the Object
(1997). On the Side of the Object: an Alternative Approach to Debates About Ideas, Objects and Museums. Museum Management and Curatorship: Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 383-399
Beyond the Mausoleum
Much of the discussion of the impact of electronic technologies on museums suggests that electronic technologies have been important in displacing the traditional metaphor of museums as mausoleums. This paper supports the move away from this metaphor, but suggests that this is not a recent phenomenon or entirely attributable to the impact of electronic technologies. The rhetorics currently associated with electronic technologies in museums can be…
Re-Imagining the Museum
Re-Imagining the Museum presents new interpretations of museum history and contemporary museum practices. Through a range of case studies from the UK, North America and Australia, Andrea Witcomb moves away from the idea that museums are always 'conservative' to suggest they have a long history of engaging with popular culture and addressing a variety of audiences. She argues that museums are key mediators between high and popular culture and betw…
Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory
The Materiality of Virtual Technologies
This chapter examines the display of objects alongside digital media in museum exhibitions through an analysis of interpretive approaches and forms of narrative construction. It argues that existing discussions about the impact of multimedia in museums are typically based on an opposition between the virtual and the material world, and thus interpret the virtual either as a threat or as a radical process of democratization. The chapter offers a d…
Migration, social cohesion and cultural diversity
The politics surrounding the representation of notions of community in Australian museums and heritage sites has long centred on tensions around the representation of migration history. For, at the heart of differing models of migration history are different understandings of national identity and citizenship. That this is so in Australia should not be surprising. After all, we are a settler culture, born of the British Empire in the first instan…
Books
There is no more imposing figure in the history of Australian anthropology than W.E.H. ('Bill') Stanner (1905-1981). While some of his contemporaries produced more ethnography, none matched his skill and eloquence in describing the life-worlds of Aboriginal people. While others of his age were just as closely involved in arguing for the defensibility of Aboriginal society, none did so with such convincing passion. With these two legacies in mind,…
Understanding the role of affect in producing a critical pedagogy for history museums
n\t\t\t\t\tWhile the existence of uncritical exhibition practices that support nostalgic narratives about the past cannot be denied, this paper is focused on demonstrating both the existence of critical exhibitions and on explaining how they work. In particularly, this paper looks at the ways in which the production of affective, nonrational forms of experience aimed at inducing a heightened level of engagement on the part of visitors is being us…
Engaging with the future of 'critical heritage studies
This article engages with the Association for Critical Heritage Studies Manifesto which argues that heritage studies is in need of a complete renovation. We do so by looking back to two earlier moments. The first when museum studies also called for a renovation, drawing on those experiences as potentially instructive for the immediate future of heritage studies. The second a debate within cultural studies on the value of engagement with the world…
Museum Theory
This chapter presents a theoretical framework and justification for the volume's broader aim of devising and showcasing critical perspectives on the museum (as an institution) and on museums (as a series of individual specificities and contingencies) from a range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. We approach this task from the proposition that museum theory cannot be divorced from museum practice, arguing that museums are best understo…
Collections without End
The discovery of five photographs in 2018 in the State Library of Western Australia led us to the existence of a forgotten private museum housing the collection of Captain Matthew McVicker Smyth in early-twentieth-century Perth. Captain Smyth was responsible for the selling of Nobel explosives used in the agriculture and mining industries. The museum contained mineral specimens in cases alongside extensive, aesthetically organized displays of Aus…
Remembering and Fighting for Their Own
On the third anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan on 18 August 1969, a simple but distinctive concrete cross was planted on the site of the battle to remember the eighteen Australian lives lost. The memorial cross was later toppled, lost and recovered but its physical form was never forgotten. In Australia, veterans made it a focus for their commemoration of all who served and died in the Vietnam War, replicating it across the country. This arti…
Hidden from view
‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big …
Comprendre le rôle de l’affect dans la création d’une pédagogie critique pour les musées d’histoire
S’il est indéniable que certaines expositions non critiques renforcent des récits nostalgiques du passé, cet article cherche à démontrer l’existence d’expositions critiques et à expliciter leurs ressorts. On analyse la façon dont la production de formes d’expérience affective et non rationnelle visant à induire un plus grand engagement de la part des visiteurs est utilisée pour faciliter une réflexion plus critique sur le rapport entre le passé e…
Practising lively geographies in the city
This article explores diverse ways of experiencing the city through an experimental field-based workshop supported by the Institute of Australian Geographers and this journal. The two-day methods practice workshop attracted 40 participants and aimed to train doctoral students and early career researchers in practices of observing, feeling, listening, mapping and visualizing the city. This paper aims to demonstrate how learning new methods that in…
Port Arthur and the spectre of ‘unnatural acts’ in Australia
Heritage penal landscapes are complex sites, dealing with histories of brutality while reassuring the public that criminals can be made safe. In Australia, the terrain is highly complex given the founding of the nation as a penal colony to take the human refuse of Britain. This history, historians argue, raised the spectre of the long-term legacy of the ‘convict stain’, an idea they argue is a legacy of the ‘anti-sodomitical’ hysteria associated …
Nature’s Marvels”
The history of collecting in Western Australia demonstrates some unique as well as exemplary features that we suggest can illuminate aspects of collecting more broadly. This article seeks to contribute to scholarship on the history of collecting by arguing for the importance of understanding the ways in which the value of collections—to collectors, institutions and knowledge producers—has been produced. We call this focus on value an extractive v…
Connecting Collections
Australia's vast collections of biological, natural history, ethnographic, and social-historical materials remain largely disconnected from each other and from the public. Connecting these distributed collections, currently dispersed in local, state, national, and global locales, is critically important to generate new knowledge for national and global benefit. The vision of making these collections accessible at scale, alongside innovative metho…
Scale, stillness and the migrant subject
Migration traverses a number of scales – the geopolitical scale of immigrant numbers, the scale of settlements, and the intimate ontological scale of human agency and subjectivity. It would be mistaken to consider these as separate autonomous entities of scale; indeed, their forces and entanglement underpin the construction of migrant subjectivities. This article, in a special issue of Landscape Research devoted to an analysis of the Immigrant Ne…
Sociology (16 works) · Museums and Cultural Heritage (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · History (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Law (7 works)