The Museum as a Space of Social Care

Nuala Morse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315461397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book examines the practice of community engagement in museums through the notion of care. It focuses on building an understanding of the logic of care that underpins this practice, with a view to outlining new roles for museums within community health and social care.

This book engages with the recent growing focus on community participation in museum activities, notably in the area of health and wellbeing. It explores this theme through an analysis of the practices of community engagement workers at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums in the UK. It examines how this work is operationalised and valued in the museum, and the institutional barriers to this practice. It presents the practices of care that shape community-led exhibitions, and community engagement projects involving health and social care partners and their clients. Drawing on the ethics of care and geographies of care literatures, this text provides readers with novel perspectives for transforming the museum into a space of social care.

This book will appeal to museum studies scholars and professionals, geographers, organisational studies scholars, as well as students interested in the social role of museums.

1 Introduction

Discussions of care in the museum are plentiful. Care for objects is the very foundation of museum work. Care requires intimate knowledge of individual objects, their materials and their vulnerabilities. Prevention of harm or damage, keeping objects safe, is the basis of this care. Objects are treasured and gently handled, displayed or carefully stored away. In all these ways, care practices make the museum. But while care for collections is part of the well-described operational and technical field of museum studies, care for people is less well defined. In fact, it has hardly featured at all, despite a recent focus on relational work.¹ In scholarly discussion and practice, this is often described in terms of audience engagement, community collaboration and participation. What would it mean to talk of this work in terms of care? What does care look like in the museum? These are the two questions that I explore in this book.

Outside of museums, the language of care is most commonly associated with the world of health provision or the intimacy of parenting. Within feminist ethics, care is positioned as a fundamental activity and a way of being together (Barnes, 2006; Held, 2006; Tronto, 1993, 2013). Care is important because it is part of everyday life: we have all received care during our lives, and at times, we have been called upon to care for others. As an activity, caring is about how we demonstrate concern for the needs of another, and how we take responsibility for meeting those needs. In this book, I explore care from a number of perspectives including geography and the field of care ethics to establish how we might talk about care in museum work. My starting point is a deep examination of community engagement practice – that is, the work of museum professionals that is directed at engaging vulnerable or otherwise marginalised groups and individuals who tend not to visit museums. My specific focus is on the work of museums with groups accessing social care services and healthcare, mental health services and other support organisations. As I will go on to show, care is unmistakable in the practices of museum professionals across this range of engagement settings. Care describes the ways in which practitioners use museum resources to support participants to cope with and flourish in challenging circumstances they face, due to either ill-health or social exclusion. Building on this, I make the case for ‘care thinking’ and its application to other areas of museum work and the wider field of museum studies. This book is the first-considered exploration of care for the museum – as ‘thinking’, as practice and as ethics.

The central aim of this book is to propose a view of the museum as a space of social care, where practices and relations of care are central. In this view, the work of the museum is purposefully re-oriented through ideas of care: care for things, care for stories, care for the issue, care for people, care for the community, care for staff, care for the present and the past and care for the future. Such an orientation to care opens up new ways of thinking about museum work, its aims and purposes and the skills and commitments required in practice. The museum as a space of social care also describes a new form of the museum within a wider landscape of community support organisations for people in need of care, either formal care or broadly defined. The universality of care I argue provides an approach with broad appeal and application across countries and contexts. Indeed, we all need care. At the same time, there is an urgency to this argument at a time when the habit of caring for others is largely devalued. We are faced with a loneliness epidemic and crises in social care and mental health support affecting millions worldwide, while care for our places and our environment is often discarded. As a space of social care, the museum can play a meaningful role in addressing these issues in partnership and collaboration. The hope is that this book will inform and stimulate new ways of thinking and working through care in international museum settings and support those striving towards more caring institutions. To guide these ambitions, the book draws out the wider implications of care thinking for different aspects of contemporary museum work and how the discipline itself approaches questions of practice and ethics in the museum. The museum as a space of social care is presented as a theory and practice-based concept with significant potential to strengthen the social role of the museum and reinvigorate the museum’s capacity to create value for society in the twenty-first century.

To unravel what care looks like in the museum, I begin by exploring the practices of care and affective cultural work of community engagement workers in the museum. The practices that are described in this book include work with mental health charities, dementia care units, addiction recovery services, stroke survivor support groups and a community exhibition. One aim of the book is to articulate this professional area of museum work in terms of care and care practices. My discussion is primarily based on a long-term ethnographic research project that took place between 2011 and 2013 with Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (TWAM), a large local authority museum service in the North East of England, follow-on research in 2016–2018 and my own involvement through research and practice in this broader area of museum work in the last eight years. The project of the museum as a space of social care emerges from these varied contexts.

My original focus on care was part of an empirical research project to describe the distinct quality of the community engagement work that I observed during my time at TWAM. Community engagement is a central facet of contemporary museum practice that is increasingly used as a strategy to democratise and pluralise museums and position them as social agents (Golding and Modest, 2013; McSweeney and Kavanagh, 2016; Sandell, 2002b; Sandell and Nightingale, 2012; Simon, 2010). In its broadest sense, it refers to how museums work with their diverse communities, and it is central to what we might term the ‘participatory turn’ in the museum. As a key domain of contemporary museum work, it is perhaps surprising that little serious attention has been paid to the professional practices of community engagement. The majority of scholarship has focused its attention either on the experience of participants within community engagement projects or on the wider political and institutional ramifications of this work. This book sets itself apart by attending to the experience, perspectives and everyday practice of those museum professionals ‘doing’ community engagement work, in an effort to understand the museum from the inside out. To explore the museum from the inside, I go ‘behind the scenes’ of the museum (Macdonald, 2002) into the work-worlds of community engagement workers. I follow these practitioners in the museum and out in the community in order to understand the work that they do. Through a close examination of practice, my aim was to understand something of the logic that shapes this practice: the emotional stances and rational objectives of this work. Over the course of this book, I describe this as the logic of care, inspired by Annemarie Mol (2010).² Mol developed the term through her careful ethnographic observations of practice in the clinic and the doctor’s surgery in order to examine how people with diabetes care for themselves and are cared for by others. The ‘logic of care’ describes the inner workings of practice, how patients, doctors and nurses all negotiate ways of working towards ‘good care’. As a logic, it describes the rationality of practice, as well as a ‘style’, a manner with plenty of creativity, perseverance and adaptability. In order to understand ‘good care’, we need to look closely at practice. Caring is an activity that is known only from within practice. Exploring care and its logics ‘invites the exploration of what is appropriate or logical to do in some site or situation, and what is not’ (Mol, 2010: 9–10). As such, it is not necessarily obvious to those who practice within it; it requires description to make explicit what motivates practice in each situation, and how they come together into a ‘local, fragile yet pertinent coherence’ (Mol, 2010: 10). Based on this logic in practice, Mol suggests that an ethics of care can be developed to determine good caring practices for people with diabetes. The museum is very different to the clinic, but as I will go on to discuss in this book, it is increasingly becoming a space of care in which service users, patients, support workers, care professionals and museum practitioners come together in community engagement sessions. In discussing the logic of care in the museum, I focus on two different dimensions and scales: the intimate relations, emotional registers, museum materialities and affective labour of care within community engagement sessions; and the wider geographies of care extended by museum community engagement schemes through their strategic partnerships with health and social care organisations in their localities. Across these different emphases, I place caring at the centre of community engagement work. Moving across these two scales, the book articulates the museum as a space of social care. The concept of ‘social care’ serves to connect the discrete affective practices of community engagement workers to the wider social role of the museum, and link it specifically to a growing area of practice around museums’ contribution to health and wellbeing (Chatterjee and Noble, 2013). To make clear the wider potential of care for museums, in the final part of the book, I establish a theory of care for the museum.

The book is about revealing care in the museum, and it also has two other intentions. It begins with a doubt and a paradox. My sense of doubt is about the current framings of participation and community engagement in the museum literature. While participation is central to contemporary museum practice, policy and scholarship, debate appears to be caught in a bind. The critical scholarship reveals the hidden power inequalities that shape museum participation as a form of governance (Golding and Modest, 2013; Lynch, 2011a; Lynch and Alberti, 2010; Onciul et al., 2017; Smith and Waterton, 2009; Waterton and Watson, 2011). Despite the well-meaning intentions of staff to share power and hand over control, the museum continues to exercise invisible power, and so the experience of participants is reduced to ‘empowerment-lite’, leaving everyone, the museum included, ‘generally dissatisfied’ (Lynch, 2011b, 2014). Another aspect of this critique is a practice of engagement focused on ‘doing for’ rather than ‘doing with’, in a way that is further disempowering for participants (Lynch, 2011b). Notwithstanding these criticisms of current forms of participatory/community engagement practice, there has been a general trend in the critical scholarship to redeem participation – the museum just needs more and better forms of participation. In other words, the scholarship is currently caught in a critical impasse (Graham, 2012). I am not writing directly against the critical discourse, but I do seek to move beyond this impasse. To do so, I will suggest the logic of care as an alternative conceptual path to addressing these debates and as a way out of the impasse.

Introducing a new logic presupposes that another logic is already dominant within current discourse. A further intellectual contribution of this book is to put forward the argument that the current understandings of participation are based on a logic of contribution, with particular unintended consequences that limit discussions of participatory practice and community engagement in the museum. In the logic of contribution, community engagement is focused on the contribution that people make to the museum, whether an object, a story or a form of interpretation, and discourse is concerned with the ideas of participant choice and control within the process. Choice and control are important in community engagement, but I will also suggest there is also a lot more going on. Others have argued for the need to focus on the process over the outcomes of participatory work (Mygind et al., 2015). I argue we need to go further to engage with both process and outcomes at a more fundamental level. I suggest another logic is needed to better account for participatory practice (and community engagement) in the museum – this is where the logic of care com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The participatory turn in museums
• Part II The institutional life of community engagement workers
• Part III The emotional life of community engagement workers
• Part IV Social care in the museum
• Index