Open to All
Museums as Practice not Place: Recognising Alternate Spaces and Their Museum-like Practices
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lisa Enright
Responding to the growing interest in the role of digital platforms in traditional museum organisations, this project explores digital spaces such as social media platforms where people exchange dialogue about objects in ways that replicate the practices that take place within museums. This paper focuses on Facebook groups where people coalesce to research, collect, conserve, interpret, and exhibit tangible and intangible heritage. I argue that these spaces as vital components of a broader cultural system of practices that extend beyond official museum walls. This project utilises digital ethnographic observation of Facebook vintage clothing and accessory groups supported by semi-structured interviews to explore individual and group heritage object collection and management practices. Through this research, it becomes possible to understand these online Facebook groups as spaces that allow for the negotiation of new forms of meaning-making and redefine our understanding of the museum as more than just a place to visit but rather as a broader set of cultural practices that occur as part of many people’s everyday activities. This research challenges us to rethink the long-held museum pedagogy that defines the museum as a place and raises questions about the role of the museum as an institution in an increasingly digital world. By highlighting the role of unofficial digital spaces as part of a system of museum-like cultural practice, it becomes possible to identify museum-ing as a means to foster the diversity, sustainability, education, enjoyment, reflection, knowledge sharing and belonging imagined in the ICOM 2023 definition of a Museum.
(Non-)Performative Decolonisation : Museums’ Commitments to Diversity as Self-Criticality
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Giorgia Cacciatore
In her book On Being Included (2012), Sara Ahmed analyses diversity reports produced within British higher education. She argues that these documents can be understood as non-performatives, that is, statements that do not bring into effect what they name. According to Ahmed, rather than testifying to measures adopted by institutions to counter institutional racism, diversity reports merely enumerate commitments, values and future objectives. In other words, the declared commitments listed in them do not correspond to commitments taken. In this paper I suggest that what Ahmed argued in relation to the popularity of discourses around diversity in higher education can be seamlessly applied to the current enthusiasm about decolonisation in the museum sector, where the the public statements, social media posts, and events aimed at reflecting on the colonial legacies of the institution, are presented as constituting in themselves the act of decolonising. This was never more evident than in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when museums in the UK and beyond released an avalanche of solidarity statements and published renewed policies to increase diversity efforts. Some of these institutions— such as the British Museum— having historically shown disregard towards calls for repatriation or permanent reframing of colonial artefacts. Four years on, the composition of the sector’s workforce remains largely white, with little to no evidence of change following the many commitments. I argue that museums’ initiatives under the ‘decolonisation banner’, not only shield institutions from further critique, but become an end to itself.
Gatekeeping Curatorial Voice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laura-Edythe Coleman
Museums and libraries are essential to society, often separated yet inexorably intertwined. My research applies library science theories of gatekeeping to the curatorial context. I recast the curator as a gatekeeper as they weave our stories through curatorial voice. I incorporate the curator voices of five national US museums: the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the Arab American National Museum, the Wing Luke Museum, the Japanese American Museum, and the National Center for Civil & Human Rights. Listen to our curators and their application of LIS gatekeeping theory to their work. Their incredible and thoughtful voices illuminate a practice, the creation curatorial voice, and interpret it through LIS gatekeeping theory. Once thought invisible and impossible to study, curatorial voice is revealed.
