The Natural History Museum at the Queens Museum
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens
What happens when BP, Shell Oil, and the Koch Brothers fund museums of
science and natural history? Or when market pressures influence
operational and curatorial decisions?
Corporate sponsorship of museums and science education can compromise
the basic idea of museums as reliable sources of common knowledge. By
considering historical as well as contemporary examples of museum
funding, we look at the ways in which power structures and marketing
logic are embedded in practices of collecting and display.
With Dr. Alice Bell, Kert Davies and Stephen Duncombe, and a recorded
video address on museums and climate change by Robert R. Janes, editor
in chief of Museums Management & Curation, and author of “Museums and
the Paradox of Change” and “Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal,
Irrelevance or Collapse?”
BIOS Dr. Alice Bell is a freelance journalist,
specializing in the politics of science and technology. She writes about
innovation for How We Get to Next and climate change for the Road to
Paris. She’s a science policy blogger for the Guardian and columnist for
Popular Science UK, and is working on a short history of the radical
science movement for the Wellcome Trust’s Mosaic magazine. She
previously worked as an academic, lecturing in science communication at
Imperial College, where she also set up an interdisciplinary course on
climate change, and acting as Head of Public Engagement at the Science
Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. Before that, she worked
extensively in science education, including at the London Science
Museum, and completed a PhD on children’s science media.
Robert R. Janes is Editor in Chief of Museum Management and Curatorship.
He has worked in and around museums for the past 35 years as a director,
consultant, author, editor, archaeologist, board member, teacher and
volunteer. He is the past President and CEO of
the Glenbow Museum, Art Gallery, Library and Archives in Calgary,
Alberta, and was the founding Director of the Prince of Wales Northern
Heritage Centre and founding Executive Director of the Science Institute
of the Northwest Territories. Robert is the author of “Museums and the
Paradox of Change”, and “Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal,
Irrelevance or Collapse?”. He has a PhD in Archaeology and he teaches at
the University of Calgary.
Kert Davies is the Founder and Executive Director of the Climate
Investigations Center. He is a well-known researcher, media spokesperson
and climate activist who has been conducting corporate accountability
research and campaigns for more than 20 years. Davies was the chief
architect of the Greenpeace web project ExxonSecrets, launched in 2004,
which helped expose the oil giant ExxonMobil’s funding of organizations
and individuals who work to discredit the validity of climate science
and delay climate policy action. More recently, Davies established the
PolluterWatch program at Greenpeace, which launched the report Koch
Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine
Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and
the Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York
University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the
author or editor of six books, including Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive
Politics in an Age of Fantasy. He is the creator of the Open Utopia, an
open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, and
writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of
scholarly and popular publications. Duncombe is a life-long political
activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East
Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the
NYC chapter of the international direct action
group, Reclaim the Streets. In 2009 he was a Research Associate at the
Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he helped
organize The College of Tactical Culture. He co-created the School for
Creative Activism in 2011, and is presently co-director of the Center
for Artistic Activism. Duncombe is currently working on a book on the
art of propaganda during the New Deal.
Not An Alternative
New York
09/20/2014 at 03:00PM