Museum Futures
Twitter still has its benefits, even in what may be its dying days. It was on Twitter that I was lucky enough to come across this piece by Margaret Middleton and Jamie Hagen. Ever since then it has occupied a significant proportion of my brain. Please do take some time to read it and follow references to the work of leading change makers in the sector.
I tweeted in response to share how refreshing and invigorating it felt to read it. It is an urgent rallying cry to anyone who works in museums or cares about museums, at a moment in time when the world around us is beset by inequality, violence and an impeding climate catastrophe. What will be our response?
The paper stood to out to me because it contrasted starkly with most of the conversations at the recent Museum Futures Northern Ireland: Priorities for Policy event at Ulster University, Belfast, a few weeks beforehand.
The most memorable moment at that event, for me, was Collette Brownlee’s provocation. She spoke of museums’ social responsibilities as agents of cultural democracy, of an ethical, rights-based practice in service to the public. I waited in anticipation of a lively discussion, but, after a quiet pause, the conversation turned instead to lack of resources, to our obligations to our collections, and how to communicate our value more effectively. I felt like I was in a time warp, back at least twenty years ago, at the start of my career, listening to the same conversations museums were having then.
We wouldn’t need to convince people that museums mattered if we placed as much value in people as we do our collections, if we stopped treating ‘the public’ as separate and external to us. We are people too, and we are some of the people asking for fundamental change.
I have found myself over recent months encountering increasing numbers of young, talented and passionate public-facing professionals who want to leave the sector. Most are women, many are from a working-class background, who have already had to fight hard to get a foot across the threshold. But they no longer have the energy to keep battling, hoping the sector will finally recognise the value of what they do. These are the people who engage with our visitors and users on a daily basis, these are the people in the sector who understand what our museums could and should be. And they struggle too with their own privilege and sense of social responsibility, painfully aware that many communities still don’t feel comfortable stepping into the museum, never mind trying to get a job there.
Those conversations prompted me to re-read the first chapter of Mike Murawski’s Museums as Agents of Change. There he calls for a human-centred approach to change work in museums:
'We need to truly embrace, value and celebrate the people who make up museums – its staff and volunteers as well as members, donors, visitors, neighbours, community partners, and the broader public. These people, more than anything else, give museums their meaning and purpose, and it is these people that form the basis for any process of making change happen.
Right at the end of that day at Ulster University in Belfast, I was grateful to David Farrell-Banks, who reminded us of the people who were absent, whether those within the sector struggling with precarity and lack of resources, or those outside the museum walls who are seldom included in these types of conversations. He called attention to the ways in which Northern Ireland museums have led the way in learning, inclusion, and participation, thanks to the particular challenges of working in a divided society. And he reminded us that the structural inequalities that impact our visitors’ lives, impact on us too, and therefore addressing those inequalities benefits us all.
Conversations with friends and colleagues, and with Mike Murawski himself in recent months, give me hope that it remains possible to harness this moment in time to seize the opportunities for meaningful change. Even in the smallest things there resides powerful potential.
I am paying attention as museums and other cultural institutions respond to the cost-of-living crisis by opening their doors as ‘Warm Havens’. This impulse is a human-centred response to a human-created crisis. Potentially, people will come into the museum who have never crossed its threshold before. Taking for granted there won’t be the resources to provide activities and entertainment for everyone, museums may suddenly become more relaxed, more social, more creative spaces than before. Who knows what encounters and conversations might happen, between people who may not have had the opportunity to meet and get to know each other otherwise? Who knows what ideas, what kind of #CreativeRiot might emerge as a result?
[Cover image by Haley ED Houseman, for Hyperallergic, republished in Worker-led feminist mobilizing for the museum of the future, by Margaret Middleton and Jamie Hagen, European Journal of Women’s Studies 2022, Vol. 29(4) 593–617]