Science museums in cross-cultural perspective: An introduction

Science museums have long been important sites in which to represent the achievements of science, and today such museums can be found in most countries of the world. Quite what is considered to be a science museum, however, is not always agreed upon; some definitions refer mainly to museums of science and technology, and others also include museums of natural history or medicine, or sites of industrial heritage, among others (Alberti 2022; Bergers and Van Trijp, 2017). Whether science centres, which typically do not include historical collections, should count as science museums or not is another matter over which there has been disagreement (Schiele, 2021). In some ways, this lack of clarity itself speaks to the topic of this special issue; that is, the fact that, while there are many similarities of format and content among many types of science museums and even more so among science centres, there are nevertheless also differences, especially across cultures and countries. They are not just those of definition but also of foci, styles, organizational structures and even what is deemed ‘science’ itself; that is, of what we here, in alignment with this journal, call ‘cultures of science’.

Our aim in this special issue, then, is not to narrowly limit what counts as a science museum or a science centre but, rather, to explore the diversity of cultures of science as reflected in the representation of science for wider publics in museum settings in a range of parts of the world. While we focus primarily on museums of science and technology, and science centres, the special issue also includes other formats, such as a science and technology section within a more multidisciplinary museum. Our interest is in how—in a context of an often assumed universal form of knowledge and method (i.e., science) and a largely shared format of mediation (i.e., that of the science museum and science centre)—more localized dimensions of cultures of science are evident in science displays. At what scale localization takes place is part of our interest, although in practice it is not always easy to disentangle whether it is national, regional, or to do with a particular city or institution; indeed, it may be several or all of these. In further probing of the localization of science in museums, some articles also address the cultures of the making of science exhibitions. That is, they explore the organizational structures and cultures of production, and how these—as well as what is displayed—may have changed in the past or be in current processes of transformation.

Science, cultures, histories

The ‘science’ in science museums and science centres is, for the most part, a widely shared form of scientific knowledge that, like its methods of production, is usually considered to be universal. Sometimes it is called ‘modern science’, ‘Western science’ or ‘technoscience’, although most often, reflecting the idea of its universality, it is simply referred to as ‘science’. With scientific research entailing a rigorous method aiming at discovering truth, involving verification or falsification through continuous hypothesis-testing and experimentation, this modern science has, after several hundred years of institutionalized development, itself formed a unique culture that is expressed in material and institutional practices and certain values, as well as in a vast amount of complex knowledge that is shared globally.

Yet there are other forms of knowledge that might also be referred to as ‘science’, and a wide range of implementations that constitute ‘technology’. ¹ While science museums in different parts of the world may present a good deal of similar scientific content, based on more universally shared science, they also typically show content that is more distinctive, depending on more localized concerns, approaches and cultures. The China Science and Technology Museum, for example, contains an exhibition of traditional Chinese medicine, and the German Museum of Technology includes a historical brewery, explaining the production of beer—topics that are not often found elsewhere. More generally, whether relatively traditional forms of science and technology such as these, or forms of indigenous knowledge, are included at all is a further variation among science museums. So, too, is whether emphasis is placed on the Industrial Revolution and its immediate aftermath, or on developments that are more recent, as in specialized museums of, say, the exploration of outer space (e.g., the Hong Kong Museum of Space in China) or computing (e.g., the Nexon Computer Museum in South Korea).

Relevant to these museums’ understandings of science—and what they choose to include or not—are the histories of science that inform their collections and research, as well as their displays. Predominant is a historiography of ‘science’ as not existing before the emergence of modern science, which is usually said to have begun in sixteenth-century Europe. Increasingly, however, historians of global science and technology, trace science—including the scientific method—back to ancient Greece, ancient Rome, mediaeval Islamic culture, Mesopotamian and ancient Chinese civilization, among others; and they also increasingly trace more global entanglement (Poskett, 2022). Such histories are sometimes explicitly addressed, as is the case for the Arab–Islamic tradition in the Granada Science Centre, discussed by Elaine McIlwraith in this special issue. As she shows, this science centre drew on various scales of this geographically broad tradition to present a historical overview that hinged on the regional while embedding it in a transnational frame. Although the relevance of the Arab–Islamic tradition is especially strong in Spain, there have been increasing instances of Arab–Islamic science being presented in museums elsewhere, too (Berg and Grinell, 2021). More widely, there seems to be an increased—although still fairly limited—openness to broadening science museums’ historiographies and including other epistemic traditions and local knowledges (Pedretti and Navas Iannini, 2020; Yue and Lin, 2024). Involved in some of these drawings of alternative historical trajectories is what can be seen as both a ‘decentring of science’ (Chambers and Gillespie, 2000) and a ‘decentring of Europe’ (Macdonald and Ehninger, 2025): recognition that significant scientific developments took place outside Europe and that other histories are possible and valid, and, moreover, necessary to counter complacent Eurocentrism. This is not to say, however, that what happened in Europe was not important, and neither is it to deny how much that developed in Europe has become globalized. This increasing globalization of a certain form of science, however, has not necessarily been as one-way as sometimes assumed, and, moreover, it has entered into and interacted with existing cultures of science—something that science museums might or (more typically) might not convey to their publics. An unusual example of doing so is the exhibition ‘“Wonderful Instruments from Overseas”: The Western Technological World in the Eyes of Late-Qing Intellectuals’, which was held at Tsinghua University's Science Museum in 2024, as discussed here by its curator, Jing (Jocelyn) Wang. Clear from her account is how existing frameworks of knowledge, such as Confucianism and Daoism, shaped the reception and discussion of Western scientific ideas and things in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is thematized in the exhibition, thus presenting a rather different—and more nuanced—historiography than is more usually the case in science museum presentations of that period, in China and elsewhere.

Science museums—or the science museum format—have, likewise, globalized and at the same time been appropriated into, and reshaped by, specific local conditions and emphases. Histories of science museums usually point to certain European museums as the first examples of such museums. The Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, which opened in 1752 in Madrid, is frequently accorded the honour of primacy, although this was, as its name indicates, a museum of natural history. The Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, which was founded (originally as the ‘Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers’) in 1794 and focuses on scientific instruments and inventions, is more closely related to science and technology museums (Bergers and Van Trijp, 2017: 368). The Science Museum in London has been highly influential for the development of other science and technology museums around the world, although it became the Science Museum only in 1885. Somewhat earlier was the Industrial Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, founded in 1855 (Butler, 1992: 9), which is one of the ancestors of the National Museum of Scotland (discussed by Samuel Alberti in this special issue). Yet, without denying the significance of these, it is also worth noting that there were already items of science of various kinds, including but not limited to natural history, in Wunderkammer and other significant collections in Europe and elsewhere (Bergers and Van Trijp, 2017; Simpson, 2021). At the Palace Museum in Beijing, for example, emperors from at least the mid-seventeenth century had been collecting clocks from both China and Europe (Pagani, 2001); and Brazil's National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, founded in 1818, contained not only many natural history specimens but also technologies, such as those connected with hunting and transport (especially from Brazil's indigenous peoples), and its Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences was founded in 1825 (Bergers and Van Trijp, 2017: 367). Even science centres, which are a more recent format, usually lack collections and emphasize displaying scientific principles and, thus, might be less likely to show signs of cultural diversity, do in fact vary in response to more localized emphases and concerns, as shown in this special issue by Alejandra Ruiz-Léon in her discussion of South America's first science centre, situated in Peru.

Localizing science

How to relate to more traditional forms of knowledge can be a significant and sometimes difficult issue for science museums and science centres, as various articles in this special issue show, most extensively in the case of Zise Wang, Xuezhi Wang and Xiang Li's discussion of the display of shadow puppetry at the China Science and Technology Museum. In this case, the attempt is to integrate science and traditional folk art. There are, however, also examples, albeit currently relatively few and far between, of exhibiting alternative ways of knowing—particularly, indigenous knowledge systems—alongside Western science in museums (Huerta Migas, 2020). Furthermore, in some countries, the divisions between natural sciences and arts and cultures are purposefully blurred, as is the case in Thailand, where, although there are science museums, as Nuntamon Kulutad and Pimsiri Aroonsi tell us in their contribution, the founding of national museums was also based on ideas of integrating natural sciences with Thai art and culture. Such mixing is increasingly common in many other locations, too—although the ways in which it is so, as well as the kinds of arts and culture involved, are themselves localized.

In addition to such variations, and those based on the scope of ‘science’ and associated histories of science, the contributions to Science Museums in Cross-Cultural Perspective show that there are many further ways in which displays of science for the public may be localized. Some of these are closely intertwined with the lifestyles and likely topics of interest of a place. They may also relate to a country's educational systems, attitudes to scientific and technological innovation, and the attractiveness of careers in science and technology. Science museums may be directly called upon to assist in this, as shown especially in the article about Thai science museums by Kulutad and Aroonsi, as well as, in relation to gender in China, in the article by Meifang Zhang and Yanhua Zhang. How much science the visiting public can be expected to know, the examples that might speak to them, and whether they will relish controversial topics or not, are just some of the issues that those making exhibitions are likely to take into account, and that will then, as evident throughout this special issue, reshape displays in particular ways.

That is the case, too, in relation to how museums and science centres respond to specific global concerns. In her article, Ana Maria Navas Iannini reports on the ways in which four institutions, each in a different country, acted in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Interestingly, while the ways in which the pandemic played out in those countries was in some respects significantly different, what was seen in the museums was a good deal of congruence, with them stepping into—or extending their existing—roles of nurturing and caring. Localizing, then, can also result in similar approaches in different places.

On the basis of his analysis of how a pair of objects for measuring radiation has been variously displayed in the National Museum of Scotland, Samuel Alberti makes a further significant point about localization. This is that, despite any supposed universality of science, museums collect and create most of their displays using objects that inevitably have their own particular biographies, which involve specific histories, geographies and travels over their individual lifetimes. This means that they can bring the global and local together, eloquently making the point that, in addition to illustrating more universal concerns, the objects—in the specificity of their biographies and the usually chance selection of some and not others that has brought them to the museum—can prompt science museums to ‘show that science is richly human and contingent’. Alberti's contribution here is, in effect, a call for them to do so explicitly more often (see also Alberti, 2022).

The significance of objects is also emphasized by various other contributors, including Jing (Jocelyn) Wang, who calls the mode of accessing histories that are often ignored ‘object-oriented and decentred encounters’. The special role of objects is taken up, too, by the former curator at the Science Museum, Robert Bud. He discusses the insights that can come from the academic history of science, on the one hand, and, on the other, the capacity of popular-science writing to appeal to wider publics. While recognizing their merits, however, he cautions against museums following just one or the other of these approaches: the academic ones risk producing overly obscure displays, and the more popular ones can result in oversimplifications. What is needed instead, he asserts, are modes of presentation that take the specificities of the museum format—in which objects are central—and the characteristics of museum visiting, as well as of particular audiences, into account. To achieve this will inevitably mean engaging with public interpretations of science, localization and the role that objects play within it.

Science museums and science centres in transformation

While our main aim in this special issue is to explore cross-cultural diversity in science museums and science centres, the articles also speak eloquently to variation over time—and many directly address issues of changes in the past or ones that are currently underway, as well as some possible future directions. Not only may particular local conditions lead to the opening of certain institutions or exhibitions, but those conditions may also lead to their closure, as Alejandra Ruiz-Léon especially reminds us. Such changes show not only that science museums and science centres are not immutable forms but also that science itself is not static.

Most often, however, our contributions emphasize how what is deemed worth displaying for the public and how this is tackled are shaped by wider societal concerns—concerns that may be society-specific but that may also be part of more widely shared movements. That is the case, for example, in relation to gender. Zhang and Zhang discuss how women scientists have been represented in Chinese museums of science and technology, and they show that there are some signs of increased attention over time. As they clearly argue, however, more is needed if certain stereotypes and limited modes of representation are to be avoided in the future. Complementarily, Jing (Jocelyn) Wang's contribution here is an example of an exhibition that attempts to include more women's perspectives, as well as an advocacy for the very inclusion of more of the perspectives that are usually excluded.

Increasingly, science museums, like other museums, are being called upon not just to further public understanding of science but also to change society itself—that is, to engage in advocacy or even to take on activist roles (Pedretti and Navas Iannini, 2020; Janes and Sandell, 2019). Navas Iannini's discussion of how museums and science centres in four different countries responded to the COVID-19 pandemic shows not only a changing context affecting museums in different parts of the world but also that there is evidence of museums in many places taking on proactive caring roles, concerning themselves with issues of social justice and well-being. Colonialism, climate change and artificial intelligence are just some of the topics increasingly addressed in museums of science and technology.

Change in societally oriented directions is evident, too, in the case of a science museum currently undergoing major revision: the Danish Museum of Science and Technology. As its director, Peter Bjerregaard discusses, however, the museum, which is due to open in the early 2030s, has sought to find a way of moving beyond what he calls both ‘factivism’ and ‘activism’, not least in response to anti-science movements, which proliferated during the pandemic. Often working in novel forms of collaboration, the museum seeks to develop an approach in which research is emphasized, while at the same time science is seen as part of society and culture. Among other things, this means that publics can be engaged not just as audiences but as thoroughly involved participants.

The changes as discussed by the contributors to this special issue that have either occurred in the past or are currently underway suggest some widely shared developments, such as concerns with society and diversity. But none is universal: local contexts shape different emphases. Neither are the changes discussed here the only ones that have occurred or are underway. Our contributions here cannot map all of these. They do, however, illustrate a diversity of approach over both time and space even within the globalized format of the science museum and science centre.

This special issue

This special issue, then, does not seek to emphasize global consensus in the field of museums or science culture studies. Nor is the aim to simply list the various experiences of how science museums present the cultures of science in specific cultural settings. Instead, we present readers with debates about, and examples of, science as displayed for publics in a variety of cultural contexts. The shared question, simply put, is: ‘How do (science) museums present cultures of science?’ Brought together in this special issue are contributors’ in-depth explorations of this question in relation to a diverse mix of specific foci and contexts.

It would be unrealistic to attempt to represent much of the massive diversity of science museums within the limits of one special issue. Instead, our intention is to encourage a cross-cultural approach to science museums and cultures of science and to highlight insights and questions that flow from that. Our selection of contributions is based on work that we knew, from our various networks, to be likely to provide interesting and relevant responses to considerations of localization. The authors, who are variously scholars and museum professionals, and often both simultaneously, are based in the following countries: Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States; and they write about these countries but also others, including Brazil, Finland, Peru, Portugal and Spain. While obviously far from comprehensive, the volume includes articles that discuss museums in the Global South as well as the Global North (albeit fewer from the former than we sought) and from a wide range of kinds of institutions and topics of exhibitions. As such, the special issue covers a significant and, we believe, interestingly productive mix. We sincerely express our appreciation to all of the authors in this special issue, who all did indeed respond in such thought-provoking ways, raising many considerations (more than we can consider in this brief introduction) beyond those that we ourselves originally anticipated. In addition, they provided valuable feedback on this introduction.

We also acknowledge our own collaboration, which in part goes a long way back, linked with Sharon Macdonald's work on the Science Museum in London (Macdonald, 2002; see also Macdonald, 2024, translated by Xiang Li and Huiping Chu) and Xiang Li's research on science museums (Li et al., 2021; Li and Qi, 2022), but in this current form is an editorial cooperation begun in 2023, when it became clear that bringing together authors on this topic could help to address some fascinating questions relating to our interests in science museums, including their global proliferation and the extent to which this is accompanied by localization. We thank each other for the continual discussions and mutual understanding that creating this special issue has involved. We also take this opportunity to thank the journal editors and the peer reviewers for all of their work towards this special issue, and our colleagues—especially professors Michael Beaney, Liu Bing and Eva Ehninger—for their comments and support.

Our hope is that this special issue will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners, and that it will contribute new knowledge, questions, approaches and possibilities not only for further research but also for science museum practice. That is, while generating further research on museums and cultures of science from a cross-cultural perspective, we hope that this special issue helps to promote more culturally aware science museum practice and international debate about this. We hope, too, that this in turn will inspire new, exciting and engaging exhibitions and other forms of science communication.