Sharing research ideas and connections between universities and museums is a complicated subject. Time pressures, limited resources and the differing needs and objectives of partners can make these working relationships hard to get off the ground, despite the clear benefits. Here Dr Oli Betts, the Railway Museum’s Research Lead, and Dr Anna Geurts, former Research Associate National Railway Museum at the University of Sheffield, offer a potential solution. Partnerships, they argue, can open up new avenues of collaboration, especially when kept open-minded, mutual and, importantly, fully supported by the host institutions.

How did industrial museums cross the Atlantic? When the first American museums of science and industry were created in the 1920s, they looked to Europe in order to import what was seen at that time as a burgeoning cultural institution. In this article, I look at this process of appropriation through an analysis of the changing perceptions of European industrial museums as expressed in the reports, surveys and books written by the curators, directors and trustees of the New York Museum of Science and Industry. I will pay particular attention to the 1927 film Museums of the New Age, documenting the main national industrial museums in Europe, and to a 1937 report on the techniques of display at the Palais de la Découverte. I will argue that their contrasting assessment of European industrial museums, which in only ten years ceased to be seen as cathedrals of a new age to become old-fashioned storehouses, is symptomatic of the significant transformation of museums of science and industry as cultural institutions during the 1930s in the United States.

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In this essay, I will approach museums both via their glass display cases and via the particular capacities offered by the term 'co-production'. In doing this I will draw on two genealogies of co-production. The first is focussed on the political question of how public institutions and their publics might better collaborate. It is this 'public policy' variant of the term which has most explicitly influenced the use of the term 'co-production' in museums. The second comes from Science and Technology Studies (STS). 'Co-production', according to Shelia Jasanoff (2004, p 43), was first used in STS by Bruno Latour in his 1993 book We Have Never Been Modern. It has since been widely elaborated to argue that 'the realities of human experience emerge as the joint achievements of scientific, technical, and social enterprise: science and society, in a word, are co-produced, each underwriting the other's existence' (Jasanoff, 2004, p 33). Both mobilisations of the term 'co-production' -though in different ways -are concerned with opening up political potentials by indicating a variety of 'cos', a plurality of entities interacting in variable ways and with variable, and always political, effects. This is why I opened by specifically suggesting glass display cases get a bad rap. The glass case has been totemic for fifty years of critique -a shortcut for revealing museums' too-simple, modern, imperialist and deadening production of power and of facts. Yet in starting to take co-production seriously we might say that glass cases are not responsible on their own. Glass cases are part of a wider interlinking of ideas and materiality, 'material-discursive practices' (Barad, 2007, p 146; Brenna, 2014) , which have enacted museums' rationalities. As a 'material-discursive practice', the use of glass cases plays a part in the production of particularly 'modern' types of matter, space, time -and therefore politics. This is a practice that generates a world which demarcates between objects and people, museums and the public and a past that is complete and a future which is yet to come. Furthermore, the glass case offers an argument for museums' institutional legitimacy -to secure objects for future publics 'on our behalf'. Yet while a modern imagination of matter, space, time and political legitimacy are at work in the glass case, it is always more complex and more hybrid than this. In this essay I trace the plural 'cos' at work in and through the glass display case (Brenna, 2014, p 48). These, at their widest, include: security locks, quality assurance and insurance companies, as well as physics, photography, silver and salt, not to mention 'the past', 'posterity', public policy, specific people who visit, and everyone not yet born. Both lines of inquiry suggested by co-production will ultimately lead to an exploration of the political potential offered by the hybridity always present in museums. The aim will be to explore the potentials for community participation offered by the ways in which, as Latour has put it (evoking his book title), 'museums have never been modern, either' and, through this, a productive politics for twenty-first-century museums. Drawing together both of the public policy and STS genealogies of coproduction we will explore, I will specifically argue that community participation in museums will be enabled by seeing new political possibilities in exploring interdependence between things and people, 'matter and meaning' and the 'word and world' (Barad, 2007, p 32). The first genealogy of co-production I trace here comes from the context of government and public services, where coproduction has been used to 'imply that citizens can play an active role in producing public goods and services of consequence to them' (Ostrom, 1996, p 1,073). The term co-production was used by Elinor Ostrom, and her colleagues Roger B Parks, Gordon P Whitaker and Stephen L Percy, in exploring law enforcement. They found that law enforcement was not just a case of what the police themselves did; rather citizens constantly played a role through a variety of actions such as locking their door, reporting crimes (or not) or by subverting police efforts (1978, p 383). Co-production was then picked up in the 1990s, again in the US, with a focus on co-production between a core economy of family, friends and community and private sector and government agencies (Cahn, 2004) and then again late in the first decade of this century in the context of UK reform of public service and the welfare state (

This article will consider the alignment of scientific and media practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over several decades after 1817 certain instrument makers began to specialise in the domestic entertainment market, transferring skills from optical instrument manufacture to the design of fashionable novelty devices. The instrument trade was expanding into a new middle-class market to exploit an increasing popular trade in optical novelties, exemplified by the 1817 Kaleidoscope craze and new interest among the middle classes for microscopes, telescopes, and magic lanterns. This paper will address this shift towards more popular uses of scientific instruments and optical toys. In particular it will address the involvement of the Birmingham and London optician Philip Carpenter in three popular media formats of the 1810s and 1820s — the 1817 patent Kaleidoscope, 1821 Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern and 1827 Microcosm.

The wide-ranging personal experiences of medicine that people bring with them on their visits to medical museums arguably give medicine an advantage over the histories and material culture of other technologies and sciences. No other science has ‘content’ that is held quite so deeply inside the visitor’s conscious substance and psyche. But if mis-handled through sensationalism, this can easily backfire, catapulting the visitor into a state of fear and abjection. This article outlines a sustained and award-winning temporary exhibition project that aimed to engage visitors by locating them in the engine room of biomedicine rather than the operating theatre. Four post-doctoral historians of contemporary medicine and a creative director worked together with exhibition designers in a research context to show how epistemology can be dovetailed with aesthetics to bring theory and practice together for a wider public at Medical Museion, Copenhagen.

During the opening decades of the twentieth century, William Hope was a well-respected medium amongst the spiritualist community in Britain, with positive endorsements from major scientific figures such as the chemist William Crookes and the author and physician Arthur Conan Doyle. Hope was often seen as one of the few mediums to be able to produce authentic spirit photographs. However, all that changed in late February 1922 when the magician-turned-psychical researcher Harry Price claimed to have caught Hope cheating during a sitting, by discovering that he was swapping blank photographic plates for ones with supposed spirit ‘extras’ already on them. Hope was publicly exposed as a fraud, and what ensued was a major debate between believers and sceptics over the legitimacy of the medium’s alleged spirit photography. The Hope-Price affair became a media sensation in the months that ensued, with a series of articles about the investigation and its aftermath appearing in the major spiritualist magazine Light. While much has been written about the Hope-Price affair as a key example of fake mediumship, most of these accounts tend to prioritise the sceptic’s perspective, with little attention paid to spiritualist responses. This paper will provide a more balanced narrative, focusing on one of the main criticisms of Hope’s defenders at the time: the credibility of Price’s testimony. Because Price actively misled Hope and his associates in a bid to catch the medium cheating, his trustworthiness as an objective observer and investigator of extraordinary phenomena was questioned. Key to this analysis is the essential role material evidence played in this case, with particular emphasis on the photographic technologies and processes used.