Museum – “Musealisalisierung” – „Analysis of museums“. This sequence of expressions reflects the dynamics of the term museum and a paradigm shift. The post- structuralist analysis of museums since the 1970s and 1980s has shown the institution to be more variable than formerly supposed, and it has made its political, social and economic embeddedness evident (Sturm 1990, Baur 2010). Museums are increasingly less considered as repositories of national stereotypes, but as sites of change where cross-societal processes take place and can be observed. From this perspective, the museum itself becomes an international or global(ized) form (Macdonald 2010). It is locally embedded, but at the same time connected to other places through various networks. This applies not only to museums, but to their study – the museum science – as well.

The analysis of museums aims to examine museums, multidimensionally, as “cultural phenomena worth examining in their own right” (Baur 2010, 8). This approach allows to take into view the actors, the “conductors of the memory” (de Jong 2007), the forms of appropriation of history and the cultural and identity-political function of (national/governmental) museums from a (trans-) national European and global perspective.

This panel aims to reflect on the potential of museums as objects of a self-reflective historical inquiry, critically analyzing representations. The discussion wants to focus on methodological considerations that explore through the examples of concrete case studies the opportunities and limitations of the museum-analysis for comparative and transnational historical research. It is thus directed at researchers of different (professional) origin in order to challenge any academic and linguistic constraints of scientific exchange.