Welcome to the museum. Perhaps one of the institutions that best define and synthesize contemporaneity. Museums are large public plazas that make perceptible ideologies and tensions that are usually not visible in our society. In the course of their activity, the broad notion of culture, science and art, ideology and expressions of power, norm and discrepancy, obedience and criticism, community and tourism, academicism and entertainment are intertwined and confronted. Museums, rather than analyzing reality and trying to rationalize the broad shared space of politics, aim to create a platform that allows exposing that reality to multiple subjectivities.

This course will analyze all the functions of the museum from the point of view of its director and the rest of its management team. Considering that a museum is both what is done and how it is done, the course will review the tasks of acquisition, conservation, research, communication, and display as they should be supervised by the director of the institution. We will pay special attention to the relations with the governance bodies, as the director is, above all, the person who detects the concerns of the staff and the community (both those who are already users of the museum and those who are not) and transmit it to the board members. The course will encompass several typologies of museums, including art, natural sciences, history, archaeological, encyclopedic and smaller local museums.

Throughout the course, we will study the multiple scientific, financial, ideological, and practical conditions that determine the daily operation of the museum's management. We will analyze the programming (exhibitions, public events, educational activities, publications, web) as a form of expression of the scientific and ideological definition of the institution. We will also examine the emergence of conflicts, and how governing bodies address them. We will take as a reference some of the conflicts that have emerged in recent years in American museums to understand to what extent they are a reflection of broader concerns that society has and the way a museum can use them to obtain useful lessons to imagine the future.