1 Globalisation and Museum - Perspectives from North America, India and the Arab World Lidia Guzy, Rainer Hatoum and Susan Kamel Are museums symbols of cultural dominance or spaces of social participation and integration? For a long time museum studies have dealt with the functions of museums in different, but mostly western, societies (Bennett 1995; Dodd / Sandell 2001). Comparative investigations on non-western museums have been lacking. The museum research project "From Imperial museum to the communication centre? On the new role of museums as an interface between science and non-western societies”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, tries to close this research gap (Guzy/Hatoum/Kamel 2006). The authors of this article share a scientific affiliation with the „New Museology“, a theoretical framework which was formulated in the beginning of the 1980s within the circles of the International Council of Museum (Ganslmayr in 1989: 79-84). Inspired by museum professionals from the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Wessler 2007:17), the New Museology initiated a critical debate on the necessity of new forms of representation, thus responding to claims for participation put forward by indigenous groups. The New Museology aimed at their empowerment through cooperation between them, the museums and the general public. (O`Neill 1999; Watson 2007: 1-23). MacDonald describes this change of paradigm for museums as follows: „…in particular the ways in which differences, and especially inequalities, of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class, could be reproduced by disciplines – perhaps through exclusions from „the canon,“ „the norm,“ „the objective“ or „the notable“ – came under the spotlight“ (MacDonald 2007: 3). The underlying thesis of our research project "From Imperial Museum to Communication Centre?" is that globalisation is changing the artistic and cultural expressions of non-western societies as they become visible in museum representations. In order to understand this process, the politico-cultural aspects of globalisation are comparatively examined in three different world regions (North America, India and the Arab World). The authors investigate how museum work - collecting, researching and communicating – is affected by processes of globalisation. Finally, the research project investigates different collection-related-issues (see illustration I): 1. Hatoum deals with changes in museum research in North America in the light of the Intellectual Property debates and demands made by indigenous Indian Nations. 2. Guzy links current changes in museum representation in India to the challenges of collecting and archiving endangered musical forms of expression. 3. Kamel analyzes museum narratives in the Arab World, considering especially the changing forms of representation and mediation in museums. Illustration 1 Structure of the Research Project