Museum Communication in the 21st Century: Transforming Practice

Museums are fundamentally meaning-making entities that communicate through a diverse range of modes and resources, from the nature of what is collected and displayed, to the labels in exhibitions, to the very design of museums themselves. Such communication is a way of recontextualising the social practices in which museums as institutions are engaged.

Over time, these practices have changed, from the colonial plunder of the past to 21st century concerns with more inclusive, equitable and sustainable agendas.

This seminar examines how the design of an exhibition can manifest positive changes in the social practices of museums, drawing on examples from culturally diverse museums. It builds on the social semiotic work of Halliday (1978, 2014) in relation to language, Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) in relation to images, and Ravelli and McMurtrie (2016) in relation to the built environment, to provide a social semiotic perspective on meaning-making in a museum context.

Importantly, this aligns with the concerns of organisational studies within a novel framework of organisational semiotics (Ravelli et al, 2023) that merges organisational theory and social semiotics in a new research agenda.

Date

Friday 20 September 2024

Time

1 to 2 pm

Location

Parramatta South Campus, EB.3.18

Online via Zoom

Speaker

Professor Louise Ravelli
University of New South Wales

Suggested pre-reading

Halliday, M.A.K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold

Halliday, M.A.K. 2014. An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd Edition. London: Edward Arnold.

Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 2021. Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.

Ravelli, L. and McMurtrie, R. 2016. Multimodality in the built environment: Spatial Discourse Analysis, London: Routledge.

Ravelli, L.; van Leeuwen, T.; Hoellerer, M., and Jancsary, D. (2023) Organisational Semiotics: Multimodal perspectives on organisation studies. London: Routledge.