Prelude Image A, Image B Last year, while returning from the DRH conference in Sheffield, UK, I took my 12-yearold son to the Museo Civilita Romana, in Eur. Mussolini established the Museum of Roman Civilization in his ‘New Rome’ in the 1930’s. It is an extraordinary museum because it contains no original artifacts; the collection is made up of plaster casts, facsimiles and models of Roman arch...

Nuclear criticism theorizes culture as the site of struggle between ideological nanatives seeking authority over the meaning of nuclear symbols. Following the end of the cold war, various groups have conducted this stnlggle through public discourse about U.S. nuclear weapons organizations. This paper examines symbolic conflict over the history and future of one such organization, the Los Alamos...

Recently I was asked to suggest how to judge installed i?teractive multimedia productions in a possible competitIOn for the best museum interactives. The hope is that introducing criteria and holding competitions for the best would benefit museums both by rewarding those who created excellent products and providing some guidance and examples for those who want to improve the vast ~ajority of in...

Archaeologists wishing to interpret the meanings of artifacts, both symbolic and functional, have increasingly drawn from Saussureinspired linguistic models as a way to ‘read’ the archaeological record. Such models, however, may not be appropriate for a number of reasons, and should be discarded in favor of a discourse-centered approach, which investigates meaning through practice, currently ga...

Pronominalization has been related to the idea of a local focus – a set of discourse entities in the speaker’s centre of attention, for example in Gundel et al. (1993)’s givenness hierarchy or in centering theory. Both accounts say that the determination of the focus depends on syntactic as well as pragmatic factors, but have not been able to pin those factors down. In this paper, we uncover th...

In this essay I want to address two question marks which arose during my reading of Michael Burawoy's inspiring piece. First, sharing his spirit of recreating the sociological enlightenment by differentiating between different types of public sociologies, I do not share his optimism that sociology can easily become an integral part of public discourse and practice. Second, I don't think that ma...