Transcript Negotiations of meanings, audiences and apparatuses in the

Negotiations of meanings, audiences and
apparatuses in the Museums and Science Centres
of the 21st century
Maria Margaret Lopes and Maria Esther Valente
[email protected]
Cimuset – Belgrade
2009
Introduction
• Although several scientific themes are usual and
commonly familiar to historians and sociologists of
sciences, the museums and science centres were not
yet included in the academic research as a relevant
issue.
• The historical perspective over these spaces is one out
of multiple possibilities opened for reflection on which
roles, should museums and science centres play, facing
the challenges set by contemporary times.
• The discussion on the importance of the inclusion of
museums in the reflections of science historians, is
introduced by three aspects, related to the studies of
sciences:
►negotiations ►informed consent ► scientific instruments
1 - Negotiations - the creation of scientific
institutions in relation of communication
• Understanding the current museums and science
centres as knowledge-producing spaces, they can also
constitute privileged spaces to remind us that the
scientific works are passed and supported by relations
and activities such as: philanthropic and public
supported agencies, administrators, industries, institution
directors, suppliers, media, exhibitions and standard
experiments seller, and so on. So they are not
independent of this conjecture. These arenas transcend
the scientific production and impose directives and set
trends, and they are not considered neither ‘merely’
scientific nor non-scientific.
• Today innumerable agents involved in the museological
enterprise come from diverse origins and backgrounds.
2. Informed Consent - the audience in the museum and
the access to information
• Related to the museums communication, the importance
of the audience was also a historical built process, which
keeps the contexts of the several circumstances in which
it occurred. In different moments, deeply elitist
connotations and profound social divisions are blended
with intentions of democratic actions and generalised
access to education, which museums presented as
institutions feature of communication and control.
• The historical perspective on the themes of education
and communication can also be a relevant contribution
to broaden the approaches to museums and science
centres.
3. Scientific instruments and apparatuses - scientific
concept and museological presentation
• The History of scientific instruments integrated by discussions
of the museological science, had stopped (since the 1960s and
1970s) to treat the scientific instruments and apparatuses as
non-conceptual, as objects which merely help quantify
concepts. Trends of History of scientific instruments started to
challenge the view, which suggest that the scientific principles
resided in the theory and perhaps in the experimental method,
but never in the instruments or the collections themselves.
• In order to assume the whole complexity of the role of
instruments in the connection of the sciences and the
experimentation, it was necessary to remove the instruments
from the subordinate space, from mere illustrators of
conclusions obtained by the good Physics, made a priori,
hiding the networks of their circulation and the validations of
science, done around the world.
• If the objects are fundamental in the consolidation of the belief
in the universality of the science, they can likewise be to
question the conceptualisation of such belief.
Consideration
• Actually many of these aspects, presented here, are
indeed difficult to manage. However it is necessary
to consider the importance to be ware about we are
doing and as we are contribute to change or to
conserve ideas.
• Historical perspectives can help us to make
questions in an appropriate way, to analyses what
was proposed to develop museums and science
centers and to understand our work today. So as to
open spaces and allow the inclusion of different
approaches to study and communicate scientific
culture.
Considerations
•
The understanding of the reproduction of a science in the Science
Centres brought from abroad in a non-historical manner, suggests the
permanence of an attitude which separates the sciences from
societies and perpetuates the scientific knowledge, with a certain
concept of science, as authoritarian and dogmatic, without the
absorption of questioning perspectives of scientific culture. These are
attitudes that devaluate local forms of construction of knowledge,
which might take into consideration or prioritize issues related to
regional nature, for instance.
•
The curators responsible for the collection, study and diffusion of
knowledge – give, more than ever, rise to a negotiation with different
audiences. In order to do so, the communication resources become
more and more sophisticated so as to provoke a more active
participation of different segments of the society. In this case the tone
of the exhibitions and activities held in these spaces may start to
privilege the debate on controversial themes. A more active
participation of the society may lead science to converge to social
pressures, as well as to abandon programs, which evade funds and
resources used, in many instances, in projects that are regarded as
highly risky for the society.