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Towards Queer Tours in Science and Technology Museums
Get PDFThis paper argues that the Queering the Science Museum tour series (2018) provides an example of a conceptual pathway for translating queer tour guiding approaches found in socio-historical and arts museums into STEMM spaces. I use participatory methods and qualitative and quantitative participant data to reflect on my work on the tours in the context of wider practices of tour-guided interventions. I highlight how the Queering the Science Museum tours, at the Science Museum, London, moved beyond existing models of queer engagement in socio-historic and arts museums by introducing an explicitly critically queer approach to science and technology, which has the potential to expand the possibility of queer interventions in museums generally. I close by examining the limitations of tour-as-intervention for change within the museum, while exposing the tensions around how resolving such issues would challenge queer theory’s call for rejecting the making of queer ‘normal’ within displays
P2_7 Outrunning Climate Change
Get PDFIn this paper we investigate the rate at which you would have to move Earth away from the Sun to combat the global temperature increase due to greenhouse gas emissions. By assuming the average global temperature increases linearly between 0.2 ◦C or 4.8 ◦C by the year 2100, we found that the Earth would need to be moved between 5.44 × 106 and 1.31 × 108 meters per year
P4_5 A Rogue Earth
Get PDFThe Earth decides a giant mirror would be the best defence against the Death Star’s laser. Due to the conservation of momentum, when the mirror reflects the laser the mirror’s velocity and hence the Earth’s velocity must increase to 0.9998617325c. This will result in the Earth escaping from the Sun’s gravitational pull and becoming a rogue planet.As a result, this strategy would be infeasible as the destruction of everyone on planet Earth would still be guaranteed
A3_9 All I Want Thaw Christmas Is You
Get PDFIn this paper, we investigate if it would be possible to defrost Mariah Carey from an ice cube of length 2 m in time for the 1st of December if you began defrosting her on the 1st of November. It was found that it would take a total of 12.6 days for Mariah to return to normal body temperature, leaving her plenty of time to prepare for the Christmas season before it arrives
P5 2 Avian Affluence and Bovine Business Strategies
Get PDFIn the story “Jack and the Beanstalk”, Jack obtains a golden egg from a goose owned by a giant. Using equations describing the curvature of avian eggs, the volume, mass and eventually the value of the egg were obtained. It was calculated that the egg had a value of £1775.69 in 1845 when the popular Henry Cole rendition was published, which could have purchased 332 cows. This is a profit of 33200%
P5_4 The Relatively Special Voyager 1 Clock
Get PDFWe calculate the extent of the effects of special relativity on the Voyager 1 space probe by calculating the difference in time between an atomic clock in a stationary frame on Earth and one on the Voyager 1. We determine that there would be a difference of 2.19. We also calculate the change in length to be and the change in mass to be . We also discuss the possible pitfalls of our assumptions
P2_2 Big Ben 2: Enormous Benjamin
Get PDFThe time-keeping ability of an analogue clock in the modern age relies heavily on the functioning of the motor. In this paper we ask: In the absence of a motor as the limiter, assuming some kind of ideal time keeping implement with the power to provide an arbitrarily large amount of torque, what would be the limits of the clock’s time-keeping abilities? We find the optimal material for such a construction to be beryllium and with calculations using the shear wave speed in this material we find a 4.4km length clock hand to be a reasonable upper limit to this clock’s abilities
Hidden Stories of Extinction: Hawaiian ʻAhuʻula Feather Capes as Biocultural Artefacts
Get PDFNatural history museums have been the natural place to find remnants of extinction, but extinction can also be hidden in cultural artefacts. This article identifies certain possibilities and challenges in telling extinction stories through cultural artefacts. Principally, they can reveal different anthropogenic connections to lost biodiversity and challenge our perceptions of extinction and how to restore relationships with what is lost. I illustrate this through the Hawaiian ‘ahu‘ula (cloaks or capes) that were made from feathers of endemic forest birds now extinct or threatened on the islands. By approaching the ‘ahu‘ula as a biocultural artefact, this article points to new ways of telling stories of extinction beyond natural history museums.
Book Review: Kate Hill (ed), Museums, Modernity and Conflict: Museums and Collections in and of War since the Nineteenth Century
Get PDFExtinction Voices, Extinction Silences: Reflecting on a Decolonial Role for Natural History Exhibits in Promoting Thinking about Global Ecological Crisis, Using a Case Study from Bristol Museums
Get PDFBetween August-December 2019, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery covered 32 animals in its World Wildlife Gallery with transparent black veils, to highlight the global ecological crisis. Each veiled animal represented a species extinct or at high to extreme risk of extinction. The intervention, called Extinction Voices, responded to calls from local schoolchildren and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) for transformative change in addressing this critical challenge. It gained international recognition, and generated conversation and action by visitors and the museum sector. This article explores the motivations and curatorial choices behind the intervention and how audiences responded. Its focus is a journey of critical reflection – on the intervention’s mainstream environmental framing, the institution’s colonial roots and their impact on its contemporary narratives. In turn, the article considers the possibilities that open exploration of silenced colonial histories brings for museums and the global ecological crisis