Connecting Museums

Mark O'Neill, Glenn Hooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351036160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Connecting Museums explores the boundaries of museums and how external relationships are affected by internal commitments, structures and traditions. Focusing on museums' relationship with heath, inclusion, and community, the book provides a detailed assessment of the alliances between museums and other stakeholders in recent years.

With contributions from practitioners and established and early-career academics, this volume explore the ideas and practices through which museums are seeking to move beyond what might be called one-off contributions to society, to reach places where the museum is dynamic and facilitates self-generation and renewal, where it can become not just a provider of a cultural service, but an active participant in the rehabilitation of social trust and democratic participation. The contributors to this volume provide conceptual critiques and clarification of a number of key ideas which form the basis of the ethics of museum legitimacy, as well as a number of reports from the front line about the experience of trying to renew museums as more valuable and more relevant institutions.

Providing internal and external perspectives, Connecting Museums presents a mix of applied and theoretical understandings of the changing roles of museums today. As such, the book should be of interest to academics, researchers and students working in the broad fields of museum and heritage studies, material culture, and arts and museum management.

1 A social museum by design

Mike Benson and Kathy Cremin

Why do so many of us feel a sense of belonging in a museum, a sense of promise about the ways our voices and heritage are connected to museum objects? American arts teacher and cultural leader, Eric Booth, suggests that ‘Heritage reminds us that we belong; “voice” offers the promise of what we can become […] an individual life that exhibits a balance between heritage and voice can be thought of as rich and empowered’.¹ Whilst many people may feel a sense of belonging in a museum, this is not a universal experience; we argue that it should be. Of course different museums offer different experiences and we recognise the value of the spectacular and the draw of nostalgia; not to mention the value of academic criticism and research. However, when it comes to museum claims for making a difference in people’s lives and the transformative role of museums, we argue for museums as social spaces, as sites of a stronger and more collective intelligence; for different organisational structures and the development this requires.

In this chapter, based on ten years of working together at the Ryedale Folk Museum (RFM) and Bede’s World Museum (BWM), as well as being part of the MLA Strategic Programmes, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (PHF) Our Museum Programme and the Clore Fellowship Programme, we outline how we work with others, particularly in terms of testing, learning and various accountabilities. We set out from the beginning a way of working that seemed obvious to us: putting challenge, reflection and permission to act at the heart of the museum. In taking this approach, we have been unwitting activists in museums for a way of working that enables people to speak and think freely and to act independently. At face value, our work aligns closely with the past 25 years or so of public policy and rhetoric surrounding museums, yet our learning is that the culture and values of museums and museum funders too often default to hierarchical, linear and expert-led forms of work, with a narrow range of knowledge seen as expert. Why do museums remain resistant to the kind of change we have demonstrated is possible and that many of them claim to want? We cannot answer this, except to say that by working differently our supporters and members of the public demand more accountability for the actions and values, as well as the communities of thought engaged within museums and collections. It does not matter why museums resist such work; perhaps what is more important is that they become subject to greater levels of accountability.

Alongside exploring the principles and effects of our approach, we will map our learning from – and openness to – feedback and the results of our sector-level dialogue. At the earliest stages of our conversations, including colleagues from both inside and outside the sector, we recognised two things: first, how the degree of difference (and for some, deviance) in our approach placed on us a burden of proof and scrutiny from peers that other museums would not experience. Second, that we were somehow edge-walkers in museums, treading the boundary between one world and another. While the values and principles underpinning our systemic approach have remained relatively constant, the languages, theories and allegiances with which we have tried to make the case for working differently have shifted over time and encompassed learning from colleagues in public/community radio, community development, pedagogy, the co-operative movement, organic farming, regenerative and circular economies, as well as indigenous movements for preservation and renewal.

If we think of heritage as a river that flows every day, then one choice for managing heritage resources is to contain the river and constrain its possibilities, to focus on harnessing and controlling its power, perhaps for rational, well-intentioned reasons. However, for us a different, less explored approach is necessary, one that cultivates the wider ecologies upon which the river depends; the sort of tributaries, big and small, which feed into the main body and therefore play an active part in making the river flow. True, heritage can exist without museums, or collections, but collections lose their power without connectivity to heritage. A museum that is part of heritage ecology can sustain the places and spaces through which its work flows, and its work at every level is shaped by that ecosystem of horizontal, vertical and diagonal relationships that exist between individuals, organisations and place. For museum professionals, situating ourselves as part of a system of wider heritage processes means re-engineering and constructing museums as social spaces designed to connect with, as well as incorporate, the ebbs and flows of human connectivity, activism and place.²

To put it another way, we believe that a profusion of heritage is on the outside of museums and if museums want to be as meaningful and effective as they can be, they need to connect to that. Whilst museum buildings, and the people who manage them, are sometimes stretched by whatever participatory thinking is on the go, they seem to us always to shrink back to some previous construct, to revert to type; in other words, for all the initiatives and policy documents museums remain hierarchical organisations with linear mechanisms for decision-making. Sure, many diverse aspects of cultural heritage may at some point have a moment in the spotlight of museums – family, local or social history, histories of big employers or artisan producers, music, gaming, associations from bowls to the Women’s Institute – yet museums sit somehow apart, separate from everyday social processes, sometimes remote from the simple and intangible heritage of families, groups and clubs.

Our way of work is really simple: we strive to connect people to collections through abundance, recognising and inviting different ways of knowing and opening up collections to shared decision-making that is driven by mission and values, freedom of self, equity and diversity, thereby maximising public benefit and enabling a social space and heritage activism. We try to map this in the discussion below, which is divided into two parts, the first highlighting principles that support a connective, inclusive and social museum, the second reflecting our learning about sector responses to this model.

Part one

Abundance is on the outside. The abundance of skill, passion and expertise around heritage is on the outside of museums. Examples are too numerous to mention – at one end of the scale families passing on stories, metal detectorists, Live Action Role Play participants, lovers of vintage, crafters and horticulturalists, as well as academics, curators and collectors. By connecting differently to that abundance, and maximising the opportunities for people or institutions to use that abundance in museums, we start to have different conversations around heritage. If there is a belief that engaging with museums in a meaningful way brings public benefit – and, with public money supporting museums, it should – then we argue that it makes sense to maximise this benefit.

One might argue that museums’ staff cannot talk with the abundance on the outside because so many resources would be required. However what we can do is create an environment, a social space where communities and individuals are connected and may talk to each other; the role of museum staff, in other words, becoming one of facilitation, of setting the tone for conversations to happen and, moreover, supporting such a dialogue to take place from the very outset. Such a process is about enabling a sense of ‘inreach’, since ‘outreach’ can only get us so far, is too one-way and unidirectional. Inreach – or abundance – cannot be delivered by a project focus, engaging target groups or applying the brakes at a given distance in the process; rather it is a process of establishing and sharing an ongoing direction and a continuum of relationship-building.

An example of engaging with abundance differently might include RFM’s learning programme, which was already well recognised for impacts since it became the only non-national to host heritage apprentices in 2009.³ Engaging apprentices, connecting staff and volunteers to very different aspects of local planning, regeneration and business, has shaped understandings of the museum as being in the service of society. The apprentices became a valuable part of the workforce, delivering learning and expanding the museum offer, shifting standards within the museum itself about what constituted knowledge, disturbing hierarchies, expertise and the ways in which the museum would work to meet external needs in the locality. Rather than an approach of deficit – the limits of what we in museums can do with our resources – the workforce and leadership shifted to focus on what the museum could and should do in collaboration with the wider community. Significantly, those volunteers and staff who had been resistant, or doubtful about the museum’s capacity, were enlivened by their own learning from this experience, and began to have a less fixed and more open approach to what was possible within the museum as a diverse social environment. In short, they began to demand more of themselves, each other and the museum staff.

In Bede’s World, this inclusive approach was planned as a structural change from the start. In partnership with the local authority Head of Children’s Services, care-leavers were recruited as our first apprentices. Applying the learning from RFM, their induction included a programme of workshops from bank staff, financial inclusion workers, literacy support and health workers, as well as putting in place arrangements for supported housing. This approach led to significant, sustainable partnerships that improved learning across the organisation (staff went out on placements to democratic services, early years centres, etc.) and improved our approach to rights: four years in, the museum has two permanent classrooms, one hosting daily adult learning supported by Social Work, and the other housing the borough’s special needs 6th form, with weekly volunteer placements embedded in the museum for every student. This was scalable, mainstreamed work; within three years Bede’s World had 12 apprentices completing years 1–3 of advanced apprenticeships, an arrangement with three other cultural venues in the local authority to enable apprentices to rotate in 12-week learning placements. This way of work helped shape and met long-term goals around impact, income and the mission of being a social space inspired by learning. It changed staff complacency about being experts and it shifted standards about being a learning organisation away from our learning offer towards a demanding culture of active reflective practice about how (and why) we were working. Choosing to have a diverse workforce brought in their families, neighbours and friends, as well as the local decision-makers, all of whom helped to influence core activities. This more diverse workforce and volunteer body created a flow of ideas and insight that drove our programming and helped shape exhibitions and artistic and performance activity; in time the museum hosted contemporary dance, regular salons, monthly music nights, a weekly food market and much more.

Shared decision-making, vision, mission and values

It is important to note that unless there is a genuine flow, with decision-making happening at different levels, this way of working can simply fall apart. Empowering good decision-making requires a programme of clear values, an identifiable mission, as well as people having sufficient information so as to enable their decision-making; the last element – information – also requires people to be interested and curious. However, if all three tenets are in place then they can allow the abundance of external diversity to enter the museum, to become a space, or site, of activism and action. Our experience of professional responses in dozens of workshops, seminars and conferences, is that the inability to embrace dispersed decision-making is a huge barrier to change in museums. From an organisational point of view, dispersed decision-making is a demanding process; the vision, mission and values of the museum must be vigorously established and there must be clear parameters about intent; these tools create the boundaries for collective agreement about behaviours that manifest those values. This model of dispersed decision-making works outside and cannot be delivered in traditional museum hierarchies. Indeed, it can be driven as successfully from the outside as inside the museum, assuming a close mesh of values is established in the first instance.

Indeed, we would go so far as to say that dispersed decision-making has no place, and no purchase, in the established model of museum operations. Questions from our peers have focussed on the risks of chaos, lack of professionalism or intellectual rigour. Faced with the evidence of the unleashed capacity of a museum where leadership and decision-making can move across the museum, museum professionals quickly raise their concerns about uncontrolled activity spinning off in unauthorised ways or over-zealous external influences. At times we have found museum professionalism to be a barrier to connecting people to collections – it calls to mind the professional foul, in football terms more often than not a cynical scything down of a player about to score a goal or do something beautiful, a mechanism to time-wasting. Normalising dispersed decision-making in museums is at root about who has the power and permission to make decisions. It is commonly recognised that the ability to exercise influence or control through decision-making is a key indicator of social equity, inequality and inclusion. Glasgow Centre for Population Health distinguishes between ‘power over’ (where people are able to influence or coerce others), ‘power to’ (where people are able to organise or change existing hierarchies or structures) and ‘power with’ (the collective power of communities or organisations).⁴ In how many museums are people able to change the hierarches or structures of the institution? And in how many are people able to experience a collective sense of ‘power with’ through the organisation? For us, the crux of ‘power with’ is enabling decision-making. For decades leaders for social change have understood that creating environments where participants can become active decision-makers involves significant changes in power – in the way information is shared, different knowledge and expertise is recognised. Myles Horton, civil rights activist and founder of the Highlander Research and Education Centre, observes that it is the act of consciously and regularly making decisions that creates shifts in empowerment:

Any decision that has social ramifications, however segmented and small, can be an important decision in which value and judgement play a role. What we need to do as educators is to make people aware of the fact that those decisions are important and that they should know how to get the information necessary to make those decisions. What is essential is that people get the practice of making decisions and that they come to know that they should consciously make them at every point.⁵

Horton is fully aware that ‘most of us can’t make decisions about big things in society’ but argues that ‘education should try to help people make conscious decisions at every point: long and short range decisions, small decisions, decisions t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 A social museum by design
• 2 Notes from the frontline: partnerships in museums
• 3 The social role of museums: from social inclusion to health and wellbeing
• 4 Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales and the journey towards cultural democracy
• 5 Breaking out of the museum core: conservation as participatory ontology and systemic action inquiry
• 6 Thinking through health and museums in Glasgow
• 7 Partnership for health: the role of cultural and natural assets in public health
• 8 Transforming health, museums and the civic imagination
• 9 ‘Who me?’: the individual experience in participative and collaborative projects
• 10 Coalville Heroes
• 11 On a hungry hill: museology and community on the Beara Peninsula
• 12 ‘Only connect’: the heritage and emotional politics of show-casing the suffering migrant
• 13 The changing shape of museums in an increasingly digital world
• 14 Material presence and virtual representation: the place of the museum in a globalised world
• 15 Curating democratic and civic engagement
• Selected Bibliography
• Index