After visiting hundreds of museums across Alberta, Lianne McTavish chronicles some of the most challenging and unexpected sites where the idea of the museum is being reshaped. The concept of the visit as a “voluntary detour” encapsulates the way visitors travel along backroads to find small-town and rural museums, as well as the agreement to turn away from standard museum scripts when they arrive.

Addressing themes of place, land, colonization, rurality, heritage, childhood, and play, McTavish reveals the museum visitor as multifaceted, with locals and tourists often interpreting museums very differently. Case studies include the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, and the Museum of Fear and Wonder. A key chapter analyzing sites devoted to resource extraction explores how these places promote settler colonial understandings of land use. By contrast, Indigenous museums and cultural centres defy colonial messages in displays that adapt and refuse conventional museum formats.

Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.

Lianne McTavish is Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. She specializes in early modern visual culture, critical museum theory, and the history of the body.

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“The first book to closely examine small-town and rural museums across Alberta, Voluntary Detours is an important contribution to critical museum studies. Indebted to the work of Fiona Candlin on micromuseums in the UK, the book addresses a selection of institutions that have been underexamined in Alberta, an oversight which has contributed to the sense that large urban museums are supposedly superior.” RACAR

"Voluntary Detours is a great book. Lianne McTavish writes about each museum with such a careful eye for detail that the exhibitions, founders, volunteers, and locations come vividly alive to the reader. She then develops these observations into wide-ranging critical arguments about people's practical, political, and emotional relationship to museums. This ability to combine description with cultural debate is itself a real skill; it is only because the writing is so lucid and elegant that she makes it looks easy." Fiona Candlin, Birkbeck, University of London, and author of Micromuseology: An Analysis of Small Independent Museums