Snapshots of Museum Experience

Elee had planned to turn her thesis into a book. She got as far as sketching an outline for the final book before she became too ill to continue. Since Elee’s death, I have been working on refashioning and reworking the thesis, and I’m delighted to now be able to announce that Elee’s Snapshots of Museum Experience: Understanding Child Visitors Through Photography is due out from Routledge in 2018. The book combines museum studies and early childhood studies, mapping the experience of child visitors to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History through their photography and through interviews. The whole thing is set against a background of a broadly Deweyan approach to education and to experience.

I took up the task of reworking the book according to a plan that Elee and I together agreed one afternoon in the May of 2016 in our favourite coffee shop, just a few weeks before her death. Elee had always hoped that the book might be a way of disseminating her research to museum educators and to other scholars. The hardback edition—due out some time around August—will be rather pricey, but hopefully there will be paperback and ebook editions as well that cut the cost significantly.

I may continue to occasionally post about Elee’s work here, so do stay posted. And do by all means get in touch if you want to know more about any of her work, or just want to say hello.