Andrew Simpson- Bachelor of Arts, PhD, Postgraduate Cerificate in Higher Education
- The University of Sydney
Andrew Simpson
- Bachelor of Arts, PhD, Postgraduate Cerificate in Higher Education
- The University of Sydney
University Museums and Collections Journal
About
267
Publications
98,237
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,077
Citations
Introduction
I introduced and developed Australia's first undergraduate degree program in Museum Studies followed by a suite of postgraduate programs, both delivered from a Science Faculty. I have research interests in the history, role and functions of museums in society, in particular, university museums, museum education, natural history and the public understanding of science. I also retain research interests stemming from my PhD studies in Paleozoic geology and conodont biostratigraphy and taxonomy.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
June 2022 - present
May 2018 - June 2021
April 2014 - April 2018
Publications
Publications (267)
The Museums and Collections of Higher Education provides an analysis of the historic connections between materiality and higher education, developed through diverse examples of global practice.
Outlining the different value propositions that museums and collections bring to higher education, the historic link between objects, evidence and academic...
This case study describes a project designed by university museum curators, managers and educators working in collaboration with curriculum designers to elicit new uses for university museum collection objects in the delivery of tertiary, secondary and primary education programs. It involves an object-based learning community of practice experiment...
There has long been a close relationship between the process of collection building and their use in the generation and transmission of knowledge. However, it has only been in recent decades that university museums have been considered an identifiable field of inquiry, mainly as a specialism of museology that results from the close alignment of mat...
Fossils and First Nations artifacts are both physical remains that demonstrate the deep history of the Earth and its inhabitants. Modern museums have become the places where both of these kinds of natural and cultural heritage are often stored. Yet, many museums carry baggage of institutional distrust, rooted in damaging colonial practices that rel...
Edited volume of papers about the return of material from university museums undertaken as part of an ICOM funded project on restitution and return from university museums.
Anthropogenic climate change is one of multiple interlinked challenges currently confronting humanity. The physical changes to sea levels, temperatures, oceanic and atmospheric stability represent a threat to planetary well-being with profound implications for the future (or lack thereof) for humanity. The entangled nature of these many crises (Vic...
En este artículo se presentan algunos antecedentes históricos del creciente uso de museos y colecciones como medios para articular la identidad institucional en la enseñanza superior, lo que se interpreta como una manifestación específica del patrimonio académico. Se suele argumentar que los museos y las colecciones son componentes institucionales...
Higher education has seen many changes since the turn of the century. One of these has been a more expanded uptake of object-based teaching and learning across various curricula, including in subject disciplines that have not historically employed materiality as a basis for pedagogy. The formation of an international committee of ICOM (Internationa...
The museum, like the university, is a form of knowledge technology empowered by the European enlightenment and Western epistemology. This technology prioritises and enables a knowledge system based on observation, objectification, measurement, quantification and classification.
Many museums, including university museums have diverse collections i...
The full life cycle of undergraduate and postgraduate museum studies programs,
from proposal, inception, growth, and change, through to cancellation over a ten
year period at Macquarie University are discussed. This focuses on aspects of the
program that made them successful with students, if not the institution, through a
combination of analysi...
The Council of Australian University Museums and Collections was established some 30 years ago. Their earliest achievement of significance was initiating the first, and still only, national survey of museums and collections in Australian higher education. The results were two documents published in 1996 & 1998 known as the Cinderella reports. The n...
An editorial on the theme of the UMAC 2023 conference
The disruptive forces of the pandemic affected all facets of life with the wheels of neo capitalism coming to a screaming halt worldwide. In recognition of this major global disruption, the Macquarie University Gallery conceptualised the exhibition Nationalism in the Wake of COVID as a research project to review the dialectics between international...
Wanting to address the public’s call for information, and the fear triggered by the
stream of disinformation from the internet, media, and rising conspiracy theories;
we engaged ourselves to inform teachers and students on ‘living with viruses’
through the organization of debating sessions in the university museum. This is the full paper on a colla...
This paper documents a novel combination of art therapy
and reminiscence therapy for people living with dementia
and their carers. The Art and Object Engagement
program was a collaborative community engagement
project between two campus museums involving art and
social history collections for a group of people with limited
opportunities for cultura...
This paper documents a novel combination of art therapy
and reminiscence therapy for people living with dementia
and their carers. The Art and Object Engagement
program was a collaborative community engagement
project between two campus museums involving art
and social history collections for a group of people with
limited opportunities for cultura...
Editorial for the UMAC Journal 13 (1), being the abstracts volume for the UMAC Universeum 2021 conference
The Ireviken Event was the first Middle Paleozoic event consisting of synchronised faunal, isotopic and facies change to be recognised. An analysis of the conodont faunas throughout the Boree Creek/Borenore Limestone succession in the central western region of the Tasman fold belt of New South Wales (Australia) revealing all five conodont zones tha...
This paper presents data about the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on university museums and collections through the stories and reflection of individual university staff from Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia. It is shown that one common impact was the requirement for university museums and collections to transfer much of their prog...
This paper argues that creative use of material collections
in higher education has the potential to significantly
counteract the marginalisation (or residualisation) of the
humanities in many national university sectors. Material
collections have been at the core of knowledge-based
organisations since antiquity but their cross-disciplinary
utility...
At the heart of this 'object-based learning' 2018 L&T funded project was the aim to develop a model to comprehensively map collection objects with units across campus and out into schools. The purpose was to remove barriers between the learning and teaching community and the Macquarie University collections. Due to timing and resource restraints th...
In 2017 the annual conference of UMAC, the international committee of ICOM for university museums and collections, was held in Finland at two primary locations, the University of Helsinki and the University of Jyväskylä. This was the seventeenth annual meeting of the group who came together to consider the range of global issues that impact univers...
The process of applying a collection level significance assessment to the entire geological collection at the University of Canberra reveals an interesting and unique collection that reflects past academic endeavours at the former pre-university institution focused on the production of industry ready graduates to feed historic economic booms in Aus...
Neil Frazer is an Australian artist who has exhibited extensively in Australia and New Zealand since the mid-1980s and is recognised for his large scale canvases, encompassing abstraction and figuration. A common theme in his works is coastal landscapes. A donation of several works to the Macquarie University Art Gallery provided an opportunity to...
Objects have always been associated with knowledge. Their contradictory nature of immutability through observation and measurement, and variability through a capacity for recontextualisation, gives them power and poignancy as tools in education. Their central role in teaching and learning is a higher education tradition that extends back to the Ren...
Representing over a century of leading college and university museums, the presenters will reflect upon the fundamental ideals of academic museums and their essential importance in providing perspective, understanding, values and wisdom to students, faculty and a general public buffeted by the competing concerns of an increasingly fragmented and co...
This paper focuses on the initial stages of a pilot project, seeking to support and develop object-based learning within the university curriculum across Macquarie University – and to showcase the value of collections as research infrastructure. It is the first multi-site museum project to receive funding at this university – because of expected va...
From the early 1980s to the early 2000s, MUCEP (Macquarie University Centre for Ecostratigraphy and Palaeobiology) undertook field work in remote far north Queensland. The focus was developing a biostratigraphic understanding of middle Palaeozoic
strata through the study of microfossils, extracted from limestone by acid leaching and macrofossils. T...
This paper considers the application of five specific, related frameworks, usually associated with large, well-funded institutions and discusses how they can be applied to a small campus museum. We discuss programs developed by the Australian History Museum at Macquarie University in Sydney and show how these support either individual or multiple f...
Late Silurian and Early Devonian conodonts are documented from outcropping limestones at nine Cobar Supergroup localities: the Booth Limestone, the Mountain Dam Limestone, the Beloura Tank Limestone Member of the Baledmund Formation, the “Lerida Limestone Member” of the Amphitheatre Group, and limestones in Stoney Creek in the Gundabooka National P...
This paper charts a small collaborative research project involving managers of university museums and collections based in one higher education institution. Data around museum and collection processes were gathered over a one-year period in an attempt to develop and quantify a series of value propositions. These are explored with the framework of v...
Questions
Questions (5)
Knowledge can be produced in many places; business, government, broadcasting, entertainment and many self-organised citizen groups. Universities and museums, however, are often referred to as organisational types whose primary purpose is knowledge. In considering how knowledge functions to benefit society, there are two separate but linked processes namely, the generation of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge. The Humboldt model links the two together as interdependent in the academy where research, as the generation of knowledge, informs teaching which can be considered a specialised form of knowledge transmission.
Museums on the other hand transmit knowledge mostly through exhibition work and informal education programs rather than the structured curriculum of universities. Larger museums will also undertake the generation of knowledge where possible. But most small museums have no, or little, capacity to undertake research. Even larger museums in western nations with neoliberal government agendas are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a capacity for research. With decreasing government financial support many larger museums have to rely on generating revenue through knowledge transmission activities.
In functional terms should museums be essentially considered as knowledge transmitters rather than knowledge generators? In other words is their most important role is interpreting and communicating knowledge that has been developed elsewhere, such as in universities?
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this question and any links to pertinent literature.
The Council of Australian University Museums and Collections is currently calling for proposals for our symposium to be held at the Australian National University on April 6, 2018.
While the symposium is primarily a way for us to gauge the Australian experience of this issue, we also welcome international perspectives. Even if you are not able to attend the symposium, we'd love to hear responses to this question from your part of the world.
A number of associated questions follow from this:-
How have universities dealt with the issue of legacy collections?
What are the advantages and pitfalls of valuing legacy collections based on their potential for new research?
How do you manage a collection to be ready for research that might currently be unforeseeable?
What does this mean for collections whose research potential is unknown?
The thoughts of university curators, researchers, professional staff, administrative staff, university leaders and students who would like to help shape our thinking on this issue are welcome. Also interested in examples from your area of expertise.
And of course, if you are in our part of the world at the time, please come to the symposium!
