Kevin Coffee

Independent practitioner and theorist

Very diverse cultural practices develop within sufficiently large polities, in response to, and contributing to, a matrix of social relationships. Museums play a formative role in defining and reproducing those relationships through their policies and narrative practices. As importantly, how museums are construed, who uses them, and how they use th...

Maier’s photographs constitute a redemptive body of work that saved from oblivion not simply a space in time, but people and social acts. Importantly, they reveal a predilection for recording life events of the socially marginalized, combined with a comparative analysis of that alterity in images of privileged individuals whose lives comprised her...

Established in 1823 as an industrial enclave, Lowell, Massachusetts, was described by a network of canals that diverted waterpower to an array of integrated cotton textile mills. The qualitative advances in engineering and materials science, which drew from and propelled the productive consumption of industrialisation, were particularly manifest in...

Museums and Social Responsibility examines inherent contradictions within and effecting museum practice in order to outline a museological theory of how museums are important cultural practices in themselves and how museums shape the socio-cultural dynamics of modern societies, especially our attitudes and understandings about human agency and crea...

Abstract Museums are not neutral organizations; they are active social participants. While museums serve many social purposes, fundamentally they define and express major social narratives. Museums are important collections of ideological symbols and perform a special communication as well as legitimizing role. The narratives conveyed by museums ar...

Museums and Social Responsibility examines inherent contradictions within and effecting museum practice in order to outline a museological theory of how museums are important cultural practices in themselves and how museums shape the socio-cultural dynamics of modern societies, especially our attitudes and understandings about human agency and crea...

Historians studying the utopian Oneida Community have often located its demise in rising internal dissent and failing consensus among its members, with special emphasis on the personal jealousies and generational tensions that its practice of group marriage may have produced. Those studies step past the essential place of work and industry in commu...

Recent research has adopted the term Anthropocene to describe the distinct era of planetary history that corresponds that Euro-American industrial revolution in textile manufacturing. Established in 1823, the planned city of Lowell, Massachusetts was described by a network of canals that diverted waterpower to each of several integrated cotton text...

Museums are traditionally places in which the past is ‘learned’. They are discursive instruments, centered on a collection of shared narratives drawn from, and illustrated by, the tangible and intangible heritage preserved in their collections. But the traditional museology of contemplative connoisseurship has generally militated against Douglass’s...

Histories of the nineteenth century utopian Oneida Community eventually reference that commune’s massive residential complex, which they sometimes called their Mansion House. However, just as often, those histories gloss that built assemblage, so that it appears as an inevitable, incidental, or “just so” part of a more important hagiography of pers...

The Oneida Community in central New York (1848-1881) turned from subsistence agriculture and handcrafts to factory production (animal traps, silk thread, printing) during its first decade and from then increasingly enmeshed itself in mechanization and in the mainstream market economy. That economic integration gradually – perhaps imperceptibly – in...

Bois de Boulogne was a key urban design effort of Second Empire France. This essay surveys the landscape of the park with particular attention to water; social practices that engendered the use of water, and social practices which water enabled. The hydrology of the site — the grand lake, streams and waterfalls — is a statement and demonstration of...

Despite its title, Museum Representations of Maoist China does not examine a broad group of collections or exhibitions – it is limited to Britain – nor does it analyze the few it does describe very deeply. Readers will not therefore encounter a comparative discussion that includes the Cultural Revolution Museum in Guangdong Province, China, or non-...

Museum use is a process of ideological negotiation, and thus museum users are active agents, not empty vessels waiting to be filled with curatorial narrative. Ensuing dialogues argue over trivia as well as important ethical issues. Discussants take up topics that range over specific public programs, the object maker's motivations and intentions, th...

Ninety years ago, Herbert Bolton recalibrated Americanist historiography and ethnography toward the narrative of the Borderlands by arguing for the Hispanic significance to the prior 400 years. That argument was not, however, without its romantic emphasis on elites and somewhat shallow consideration of the subaltern. As Weber has observed, Bolton c...

This study surveys the built landscape of New York's Central Park as what Tim Ingold calls a "pattern of activities collapsed into an array of features," finding that the carriage drives are a defining feature of the park's original design. The attention to detail and eco-nomic investment in the drives embody the cultural sensibilities that governe...

The project I describe explores a process in which museum users generate ideo-cultural repertoires in the course of dialogically interacting with narratives presented via the museum. This process is facilitated by the visitor comment book which, in this example, was not intended as an evaluative tool but as a means to foster discussion within the e...

The paper is written as a contribution to critical archaeology and in that effort as a critique of certain views — suggested as a Marxian analysis — that consider capitalism as only or mainly a set of economic relationships. Contra that perspective, I argue for a much wider lens.

The social importance of the museum centers on the social practice of narrative construction. Museums tend to structure their narratives from the perspective of those who administer and govern them. Audiences construct narratives dialogically with their peers, as well as in response to museum texts. Table of Contents, an exhibition at the Witte Mus...

Museum exhibitions are forums for both perception and reflection, engaging in emotional as well as rational interactions with their users, prompting or enabling dialogues that continue without any further museum participation.

Museum use is an inherently dialogic and social practice*sets of actions and cognitive processes that are enacted in response to, and within, specific socio-cultural contexts and within specific social relationships. By studying those practices, visitor research can tell us a great deal about how users operationalize the communicatory function of t...

One of the most dramatic exhibits at the American Museum is the assemblage of figure sculptures that stand in the large ceremonial Haida canoe on exhibit in the 77th Street lobby. This life group depicts individuals from several Northwest Coast tribes, intended as an opportunity to portray the cultural diversity of the Northwest Coast peoples and t...