Natalia Grincheva

University of Melbourne | MSD · School of Culture and Communication

This article is based on a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the academic literature on cultural diplomacy since its official inception during the midst of the Cold War, in 1959. It draws on mapping, chronology building, and thematic analysis of all scholarship published on cultural diplomacy in the Scopus database, the largest academic da...

Tracing transformations in the museum agency under the pressure of the pandemic crisis in 2020, the article conceptualizes museums as dynamic ‘contact zones’ of heritage diplomacy. It explores two foundational components of a contact zone, such as building a social space for a cross-cultural encounter, negotiation and debate as well as offering a p...

This chapter conceptualizes changes in arts management practices from the perspective of cultural diplomacy, which has experienced significant transformations in the age of increasing digitalization. It explores and illustrates how new media technologies and data practices recalibrate the context in which cultural diplomacy operates by reshaping th...

The article analyzes the case of museum diplomacy during the Covid-19 global outbreak to illustrate two important trends that were reinforced in the condition of the pandemic. First, it argues that digital innovations achieved by cultural institutions in their international communication in the conditions of mass closures and national lockdowns sig...

The article interrogates if data visualization, despite its inherited subjectivity, can be used not only as a tool for data representation but also as a research platform to facilitate an iterative exploratory process to identify new themes, raise new questions, and generate new knowledge. It addresses this task by pursuing a twofold research goal....

The article documents connections and synergies between city museums’ visions and programming as well as emerging smart city issues and dilemmas in a fast-paced urban environment marked with the processes of increasing digitalization and datafication. The research employs policy/document analysis and semi-structured interviews with smart city gover...

Historically, museums have earned their dedicated role as important agents of cultural diplomacy. In the age of increasing urbanization, museums have become important center of urban soft power and actors of city diplomacy. This chapter argues that museums are vital actors of city diplomacy, because of a high cultural and economic value of their “h...

Cultural diplomacy has traditionally been a strategic instrument of national governments to achieve foreign policy objectives. Nation states have supported the international missions of museums to promote national cultural ideas and values abroad to pursue strategic geopolitical interests. However, in the twenty-first century the complex process of...

The article proposes, justifies, and tests a new methodological framework to measure museum ‘soft power’ by employing geo-visualization as a new method empowered by the rapid development of digital humanities. This research not only demystifies the buzz term of ‘soft power’ that is frequently applied in relation to contemporary museums and their in...

This article explores the ‘GuggenTube’ phenomenon, which was the result of a collaboration between Google and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to celebrate the five‐year anniversary of YouTube. It proposes a case study of the 2010 YouTube Play creative video contest, which featured worldwide user‐generated content to promote pop video culture i...

Founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, the State Hermitage Museum in Russia is one of the largest and best-known museums in the world. With 3 million objects displayed in six buildings along the Neva River, the Hermitage Museum occupies an important position alongside such leading museums as the Louvre, British Museum and Metropolitan Museum. The...

This chapter focuses on the application of visitor studies methodologies to museums as cultural institutions that incorporate digital media into their cultural programming and social activities. It provides a comprehensive guide to three types of research methods employed by contemporary museums to study online visitors: quantitative, behavioral an...

As a digital museum ethnographer, I would like to devote this chapter to sharing my personal experience in addressing ethical considerations while conducting research on museum visitors’ behavior in online spaces. My research looks at online museums as important sites of cross-cultural communication. These sites project powerful political and cultu...

While much has been written already about the Bilbao effect in terms of economic impacts,11 there is no dedicated research yet that would explain why the Guggenheim Bilbao phenomenon came into existence and what external forces and consequences directly contributed to its development. Moreover, it is even more fascinating to find out how this succe...

Through a genealogical analysis of such a phenomenon as an American museum this chapter traces the core philosophical ideals of the American democratic tradition and a national belief in the institutional destiny of the U.S. museums. Drawing on the genealogy, as a Foucauldian method (1984) to trace ‘origins’ and to question them on deeper levels, m...

This article reports on research that analysed a number of sustainable development reports by international organisations which consolidate findings from different countries, to produce evidence of the powerful role of culture in sustainable development of various communities. The research looked at reports on sustainable development through cultur...

This study identifies, analyses and compares media content produced by Russian and Chinese TV channels surrounding the events of the Fifth BRICS Summit in Durban, South Africa, in 2013. The study utilizes a comparative frame analysis to deconstruct and explain media messages communicated by Russian and Chinese media representing national identities...

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and facilitated by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) through the Museums Connect program, Identities: Understanding Islam in a Cross-cultural Context is an exercise of community development and public inclusion from the perspective of cultural diplomacy. The 2009–10 project was a cooperative endeavor b...

This study aims to explore the influence of social media platforms employed by the internationally recognized museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, in the development and implementation of its famous online participatory project—the World Beach Project. The research looks at the behaviour, size and geographic distribution of inter...

This article explores the discourse around the events of the Fifth brics Summit, as constructed through Russian media coverage across three channels: Russia Today (rt); Channel One Russia (1tv ru); and Russian Television International (rtvi). Through comparative analysis of how the brics Summit was portrayed by different channels, the article aims...

Drawing on the Habermas theory of public sphere and communicative action, the paper looks at the Singapore Memory Project as an online social space representing two different communicative rationales, describing the social dimension of the online mass communication processes: strategic “colonization” and public “emancipation.” On the one hand, the...

Drawing on the Virtual Museum of the Pacific case study, my research explores epistemological differences between Western and Indigenous Pacific cultural systems of understanding and conceptualization of cultural memory and identity. The article critically analyses the digital repatriation and preservation project "The Virtual Museum of the Pacific...

The article considers Foucault’s critique of institutions as a form of political power by looking at museums, which claim to operate independently on a global scale and indeed seem to be driven exclusively by institutional logic and interests outside the control of their nation states. However, their international communication and global public re...

Building on Tony Bennett’s (1995) understanding of a museum as a “civic laboratory,” this study advances this framework by researching a museum space in a virtual world. It shows that an online museum can be understood as a “placeless” space of a “civic laboratory” by analyzing visitor research methodologies that are utilized online. Through compar...

This study discusses several issues that museums face when utilizing social media in their international communication. This discussion is framed within the discourse of the new cultural diplomacy and this paper proposes a specific role for museums in cross-cultural diplomatic relations. This new model for contemporary museums as vehicles for a 'tr...

The article is based on a synthetic comparative analysis of two different epistemic traditions and explores indigenous and scientific epistemic cultures through close reading and exploration of two books. The first book, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, written by Austrian sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999), serves as an exce...

This research focuses on the phenomenon of digital diplomacy, critically analyzed from the perspective of philosophical psychoanalysis. The study aims to elaborate the theoretical underpinnings of digital diplomacy through employing the conceptual framework of collective individuation and psychotechnologies developed by French critical philosopher...

Digital diplomacy is widely accepted in Canada and has been extensively utilised through building and sustaining the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) . The network offers a wide variety of online programs and provides interactive resources such as the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC) . “Canada’s Got Treasures” is an online portal develope...

The study outlines the problematic framework of the emerging field of digital diplomacy in the social, cultural, and economic dimensions through a close reading of Stiegler's philosophical concept of the techno-culture. The research intends to raise important questions regarding international communications in a new light of phe-nomenology of colle...

The study outlines the problematic framework of the emerging field of digital diplomacy in the social, cultural, and economic dimensions through a close reading of Stiegler’s philosophical concept of the techno-culture. The research intends to raise important questions regarding international communications in a new light of phenomenology of collec...

In recent years, museums have added social media to their toolbox of online communication in order to establish interactive two-way contact with their audiences. Social media has become very popular in museums’ online communities because it allows people to interact around ideas conveyed through texts, images, video, audio, and multimedia applicati...

In recent years, museums have added social media to their toolbox of online communication in order to establish interactive two-way contact with their audiences. Social media has become very popular in museums’ online communities because it allows people to interact around ideas conveyed through texts, images, video, audio, and multimedia applicati...

The research explores the UK digital diplomacy through rhetorical lenses of the European discourse on cultural agenda. The paper utilizes frame analysis to investigate the nature and objectives of digital diplomacy in the political context of the UK. The study argues that the UK as a part of the European Community successfully employs in its diplom...

This paper presents a case study of the Hermitage museum and its process of digitising a small part of its large collection, as well as the procedures and strategies regarding the main selection criteria for the objects to be digitised. This study is based on qualitative research using a case study of the Hermitage museum utilizing interviews with...

The paper looks closely at international social networks on the Internet through a multifaceted prism of geographical, cultural, social, and political diversity; and critically analyses the abilities of the social media to represent international publics on the Internet as a democratic and inclusive community

Within the last years, the U.S. government significantly cut funding for cultural and arts diplomacy. While arts exchanges constitute a core component of public diplomacy in many countries, recently, the U.S. arts diplomacy has not been carried out properly by the government, nor by private or public sectors. Although the international image of the...