The Imperial War Museum and public memory of the Second World War

Kasia Tomasiewicz, first year MPhil researcher, The Imperial War Museum: the methods and realities of researching site-based institutional history

With the success of programs such as the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) scheme that bring the worlds of university-based academia and the museum sector into closer partnership, the question of how to research the museum is becoming increasingly important. Researchers and museum staff have progressively tried to document the pressures and realities of museum work. Museology as methodology has, however, been under theorized. Instead, museum studies have relied on methodological principals from a range of other disciplines including history, sociology, geography, and ethnography. Studying live institutions comes with the need for particular methods and research ethics, the deficit of which urgently needs attention. This paper will outline some of the dilemmas facing researchers of museum-based institutional history.

The Arts and Humanities Research Forum is a series of fortnightly research presentations by research students and staff. The forum is cross-disciplinary and provides a regular facilitative opportunity for researchers to test and articulate research designs, explore methodological approaches and frameworks and debate theory/practice relationships in their studies. All are welcome to attend.