Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: Across different traditions of social research, the study of science exhibitions has often taken the form of an ‘object-oriented’ inquiry. In this tradition, actor-network theory (ANT) has focused on how the processes of exhibiting objects mediate relations between science and society. Although ANT has not developed as a theory of curating, it nonetheless contributes to revaluing the work performed by curators in relation to the practice of science. This article describes an ethnographic engagement with a curatorial experiment in a science museum which staged a ‘multi-viewpoint’ exhibition of an object. A display of an object ‘in process’, I take the opportunity of this curatorial experiment to explore analogies drawn in ANT studies between museums and laboratories in attending to the ways that curatorial practices mediate science. I ask whether, and to what extent, ANT can account for curating as a material practice that not only participates in domesticating objects for science but also in problematizing, multiplying and redistributing relations between objects and the social.Key words: actor-network theory, sociology, science studies, curating, objects.
Source: Museum and Society
Author: Laurie Waller
Institutions: University of London, Technical University of Munich
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2725458183