The Museum As A Space Of Social Care

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.

"Inclusion” is a word, a concept, a value, a set of practices, but what should it mean for museum staff and leaders as they envision new ways of being a museum in an emergent future? Political and environmental upheavals, and now a global pandemic, are transforming the museum landscape forever. How can our paradigm for understanding inclusion continue to transform as well? This book offers a new paradigm for understanding inclusion grounded in a retrospective of museum worker efforts to test the limits of inclusion, a reflection on inclusion’s advantages and limitations in practice, as well as the integral concerns of racial equity and social justice. Questions throughout the book invite readers to reflect on how their own experiences can add to, and expand on, new ways of thinking about inclusion in museums. Museum workers and lovers can use this book as a tool for engaging with “inclusion” anew, and as a terrain for collaborative inquiry and world-building that can help us imagine and realize new potential for museums in the future.

Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation explores Indigenous practices of curation, object repatriation, and cross-cultural community engagement in a dynamic Koori museum. Grounded in the fact that Gunai Kurnai people have never ceded sovereignty, the text reorients dominant temporal and colonial approaches of museum studies to document and theorise Gunai Kurnai self-presentation and community engagement in the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place. Researched and co-authored by the Cultural Manager of the Keeping Place, Gunai Kurnai Monero Ngarigo man Robert Hudson, and white Historian Shannon Woodcock, the book traces the temporal, social, and cultural considerations of the Elders who curated the permanent exhibition in the early 1990s. Discussing community management of a collection growing through the ongoing repatriation of tools, art, and Ancestor remains, the text also explores how Robert Hudson engages with visitors to the Keeping Place and local colonial history museums, and theorises the power of Gunai Kurnai work with individuals and institutions in the small museum context. Finally, Hudson and Woodcock demonstrate that the Keeping Place articulates sophisticated Gunai Kurnai-grounded methodologies of museum practice in relation to international critical Indigenous studies scholarship. Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation provides a vital case study of an Indigenous museum space written from an inside perspective. As such, the book will be essential reading for scholars and students engaged in the study of museums and heritage, Indigenous peoples, decolonisation, race, anthropology, culture, and history.

This book Includes contributions from a wide range of scholar-practitioners working across the arts, humanities, sciences, education, business, and mental health disciplines. Uses abundance-thinking and takes a strengths-based appreciative approach to museum purpose, function and being. Demonstrates that, even within the most difficult climates, abundance-oriented methods and perspectives can inspire and elicit flourishing in visitors, staff and communities, thus positioning museums as places where people find meaningful and purposeful work and where visitors find satisfaction, meaning, inspiration, and motivation. Draws from the disciplines of positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship, contemplative studies, and museum studies, the book is unified and organized into six thematic areas that comprise the Flourishing Museum Framework: courage, transformation, care, optimism, gratitude, and delight. Will be essential reading for academics and students working in the museum and heritage fields, as well as the cognate disciplines of arts management and creative industries. It will also be useful to practitioners working in museums and heritage sites around the world.

Plural Heritages and Community Co-production is a landmark contribution on the nature and plurality of heritages and how they can be creatively and ethically presented in urban space. Providing an overview of the concept of plural heritages, this book explores the theory, politics, and practice of community co-production as they intersect with currents in critical heritage thinking, walking as ethnography, and digital design methods. Told through a central case study in Istanbul, Turkey, this volume aligns with cultural and political imperatives to consider the plural values, meanings, affects, and relativities of heritage sites for the multiple communities who live – or, as for diaspora and displaced groups, have lived – with them. It suggests a range of methods for locating and valorising alternative perspectives to those centrally deployed through museums or other institutions, such as UNESCO World Heritage listing, while also exploring the complexities of the past in the present and the ontology of heritage. Plural Heritages and Community Co-production will be of great interest to researchers, academics, postgraduate students in the fields of heritage and memory studies, museum studies, history, geography, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and politics. The book will also be of interest to heritage professionals, policy makers, and site managers involved in community engagement and participation.

A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change. As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.

Museums may not seem at first glance to be engaged in social work. Yet, Lois H. Silverman brings together here relevant visitor studies, trends in international practice, and compelling examples that demonstrate how museums everywhere are using their unique resources to benefit human relationships and, ultimately, to repair the world. In this groundbreaking book, Silverman forges a framework of key social work perspectives to show how museums are evolving a needs-based approach to provide what promises to be universal social service. In partnership with social workers, social agencies, and clients, museums are helping people cope and even thrive in circumstances ranging from personal challenges to social injustices. The Social Work of Museums provides the first integrative survey of this emerging interdisciplinary practice and an essential foundation on which to build for the future. The Social Work of Museums is not only a vital and visionary resource for museum training and practice in the 21st century, but also an invaluable tool for social workers, creative arts therapists, and students seeking to broaden their horizons. It will inspire and empower policymakers, directors, clinicians, and evaluators alike to work together toward museums for the next age.

Drawing on Elaine Heumann Gurian’s fifty years of museum experience, Centering the Museum calls on the profession to help visitors experience their shared humanity and find social uses for public buildings, in order to make museums more central and useful to everyone in difficult times. Following the same format as Civilizing the Museum, this new volume includes material written especially for a re-emergent time and relevant public lectures not included in the author’s previous book. Divided into six separate content clusters, with over twenty different essays, the book identifies many small, subtle ways museums can become welcoming to more—and to all. Drawing on her extensive experience as a deputy director, senior advisor to high-profile government museums, lecturer and teacher around the world, the author provides recommendations for inclusive actions by intertwining sociological thinking with practical decision-making strategies. Writing reflectively, Elaine also provides heritage students and professionals with insights that will help move their careers and organizations into more equitable, yet successful, terrain. Centering the Museum will be an excellent companion volume to Civilizing the Museum and, as such, will be a useful support for emerging museum leaders. It will be especially interesting to academics and students engaged in the study of cultural administration, as well as museum and heritage practitioners working around the world.