Helen Graham
My research lies at the intersection of political theory and participative and action-led forms of research. With museums, heritage and place as a focus, I investigate political dynamics of property, rights and claims; of democracy; of agency and affinity. I do this through participative and action-led research methods, experimenting with how small-scale participatory work can be combined with large scale whole system action. These interests and approaches cohered as a result of work conducted as part of the co-designed AHRC Connected Communities project, How should heritage decisions be made? project (2013-2015). Since then I have embarked on two strands of research. The first in York in collaboration with architect Phil Bixby is a staging of large scale participatory public engagement process (My Future York / My Castle Gateway / My York Central) in key areas of urban regeneration and city-level development. The approaches developed through these projects have combined the personal through narrative, story-telling and imaginative methods to enable personal articulation (hence the 'my' in the project titles) with developing a new form of public sphere via inquiry-led forms of debate and discussion and an approach to change that actively works across scale from large scale institutional/government-led infrastructures and investment to tactical experiments and community-led action. The second is via Bradford's National Museum: Connecting Bradford and the National Science and Media Museum where I am working with the museum staff, other researchers and a number of project partners to explore connections between the museum and Bradford. Linking all the key issues - Bradford, the museum, communities, science and technology - is an exploration of the benefits of relational approaches through action-led and experimental methods.
less
InterestsView All (18)
Uploads
The site of the study was the LoveArts festival, organised by the Leeds Arts and Minds Network, and the Directorate of Strategy and Partnerships of the Leeds and York Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust, which works to disseminate good practice on the links between the arts and mental health. At the heart of the project are five festival goers’ accounts of the ways in which participation in the arts contributes to or facilitates their wellbeing, and helps them to live well in their city. We also conducted a series of conversations with a range arts and cultural organisations across Leeds. With these cultural partners we explored the ways in which they currently engage with their audiences, visitors and participants; and addressed their future priorities and challenges in developing organisation-participant relationships.
A principle feature of this report is its demonstration of a variety of ways in which people make use of the arts within ‘everyday life’. One of its key findings is that experiences of the arts can pervade and shape the moods, feelings and routines of people’s lives in ways that are central and essential to the living of a satisfying life. The articulations our participants have given to their cultural experiences are powerful testimonies to the value of an expressive, creative, shared life, one facilitated by cultural organisations and spaces. Our findings suggest that value is not best thought of as knownable separately from everyday life. Rather there is a need to make knowing the ‘value’ of their work part of how arts and cultural organisations operate from day-to-day. As such, our work also makes a strong case for arts and cultural organisations to develop participatory research methods, and reflexive practice, within their own everyday activities.
Heritage is about what we value: places, buildings, objects,
memories, cultures, skills or ways of life. So why can it be so hard to get actively involved in heritage decision-making?
Heritage becomes defined when decisions are made: what to preserve, what to show, what to think of as worth celebrating and sharing. In our research project we explored how such decisions could be opened up to greater participation.
based at the Smithsonian Institution. The Museums for Us project responded to the institution’s epistemic openness by working with people with intellectual disabilities, their families and teachers to explore and share their experiences and views of museum visits. In its final section, the article returns to its point of origin - a seminar held by the Centre for Education and Museum Studies - where five of us involved in the project (some of us with and some of us without intellectual disabilities) spoke of our experiences in our own voices and in our own way. For some staff in the room this created the conditions for a kind of ‘tacit’ knowledge (Strathern 2000), which has since enabled future programmes at the Smithsonian. Yet for
others the seminar failed. The quality of knowledge and its basis for action were not secure. Using poetic ethnographic description self-consciously taken from the established academic discipline of anthropology, this essay - taking a certain ethical risk - re-encodes the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities visiting museums within an academic register. It does this very deliberately to explore the epistemic techniques through which certain ways of knowing access as life and contingency might become seen as a ‘useful’ approach to knowing access for a wider range of museum practitioners. The article, therefore, also knows itself as an access practice which, as with many access practices in museums themselves, makes exclusions as it seeks to make available something it believes is of crucial significance."
Abstract
Copyright is a means of managing the interests of individual authors and those
of the ‘public interest’. In a museum context, copyright is a technical practice which illuminates how museums imagine and manage their own organizational legitimacy – a settlement which has often operated through a ‘public interest argument’ (‘we need you to hand over control of your object/story for the benefit of all’). Drawing on interviews with people who work in museums and those who
have taken part in a museum participation project, we focus on a digital storytelling project to show how copyright was deployed to make an in-practice argument for the how museums might legitimately relate personal story telling with the ‘
public
interest’. The project did this through three processes:
coming
into the public
via managing informed consent through evoking future audiences,
making an author
through creating intentional decisions and ‘responsibilization’
and
making an object
by transforming a digital story into a ‘finished’ object which
is, in turn, transferred into the museum collections. While those involved in the project recognized they had signed over the rights to their story and were, in most cases, broadly happy with this – ‘that’s what the form was for’, as one put it – the personal nature of the story itself (linked to personal memories, friends and family) and the sociality of the process of making it (in a group; through interactions with museum staff) was also emphasized. This sociality was
expressed in the sense that participants would like to be told when a story is going to be re-displayed, be sent drafts of interpretation and be invited to the opening of the exhibition – a mode of relationship with the museum consistently described as ‘courtesy’. The article concludes by suggesting that the expectation of courtesy – though it might seem like a very modest claim – does something to
museums and makes way for more nuanced asymmetries within the public interest argument. Rather than assuming that ‘the public interest’ lies in treating people (slightly coldly) in the same way, the lens of courtesy might suggest ways of both respecting the importance of the public ethos (for institutions to address
themselves to ideas of fairness, inclusion and equality) yet might also work to socialize this impulse and reimagine a responsive
public museum from the bottom up.
The site of the study was the LoveArts festival, organised by the Leeds Arts and Minds Network, and the Directorate of Strategy and Partnerships of the Leeds and York Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust, which works to disseminate good practice on the links between the arts and mental health. At the heart of the project are five festival goers’ accounts of the ways in which participation in the arts contributes to or facilitates their wellbeing, and helps them to live well in their city. We also conducted a series of conversations with a range arts and cultural organisations across Leeds. With these cultural partners we explored the ways in which they currently engage with their audiences, visitors and participants; and addressed their future priorities and challenges in developing organisation-participant relationships.
A principle feature of this report is its demonstration of a variety of ways in which people make use of the arts within ‘everyday life’. One of its key findings is that experiences of the arts can pervade and shape the moods, feelings and routines of people’s lives in ways that are central and essential to the living of a satisfying life. The articulations our participants have given to their cultural experiences are powerful testimonies to the value of an expressive, creative, shared life, one facilitated by cultural organisations and spaces. Our findings suggest that value is not best thought of as knownable separately from everyday life. Rather there is a need to make knowing the ‘value’ of their work part of how arts and cultural organisations operate from day-to-day. As such, our work also makes a strong case for arts and cultural organisations to develop participatory research methods, and reflexive practice, within their own everyday activities.
Heritage is about what we value: places, buildings, objects,
memories, cultures, skills or ways of life. So why can it be so hard to get actively involved in heritage decision-making?
Heritage becomes defined when decisions are made: what to preserve, what to show, what to think of as worth celebrating and sharing. In our research project we explored how such decisions could be opened up to greater participation.
based at the Smithsonian Institution. The Museums for Us project responded to the institution’s epistemic openness by working with people with intellectual disabilities, their families and teachers to explore and share their experiences and views of museum visits. In its final section, the article returns to its point of origin - a seminar held by the Centre for Education and Museum Studies - where five of us involved in the project (some of us with and some of us without intellectual disabilities) spoke of our experiences in our own voices and in our own way. For some staff in the room this created the conditions for a kind of ‘tacit’ knowledge (Strathern 2000), which has since enabled future programmes at the Smithsonian. Yet for
others the seminar failed. The quality of knowledge and its basis for action were not secure. Using poetic ethnographic description self-consciously taken from the established academic discipline of anthropology, this essay - taking a certain ethical risk - re-encodes the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities visiting museums within an academic register. It does this very deliberately to explore the epistemic techniques through which certain ways of knowing access as life and contingency might become seen as a ‘useful’ approach to knowing access for a wider range of museum practitioners. The article, therefore, also knows itself as an access practice which, as with many access practices in museums themselves, makes exclusions as it seeks to make available something it believes is of crucial significance."
Abstract
Copyright is a means of managing the interests of individual authors and those
of the ‘public interest’. In a museum context, copyright is a technical practice which illuminates how museums imagine and manage their own organizational legitimacy – a settlement which has often operated through a ‘public interest argument’ (‘we need you to hand over control of your object/story for the benefit of all’). Drawing on interviews with people who work in museums and those who
have taken part in a museum participation project, we focus on a digital storytelling project to show how copyright was deployed to make an in-practice argument for the how museums might legitimately relate personal story telling with the ‘
public
interest’. The project did this through three processes:
coming
into the public
via managing informed consent through evoking future audiences,
making an author
through creating intentional decisions and ‘responsibilization’
and
making an object
by transforming a digital story into a ‘finished’ object which
is, in turn, transferred into the museum collections. While those involved in the project recognized they had signed over the rights to their story and were, in most cases, broadly happy with this – ‘that’s what the form was for’, as one put it – the personal nature of the story itself (linked to personal memories, friends and family) and the sociality of the process of making it (in a group; through interactions with museum staff) was also emphasized. This sociality was
expressed in the sense that participants would like to be told when a story is going to be re-displayed, be sent drafts of interpretation and be invited to the opening of the exhibition – a mode of relationship with the museum consistently described as ‘courtesy’. The article concludes by suggesting that the expectation of courtesy – though it might seem like a very modest claim – does something to
museums and makes way for more nuanced asymmetries within the public interest argument. Rather than assuming that ‘the public interest’ lies in treating people (slightly coldly) in the same way, the lens of courtesy might suggest ways of both respecting the importance of the public ethos (for institutions to address
themselves to ideas of fairness, inclusion and equality) yet might also work to socialize this impulse and reimagine a responsive
public museum from the bottom up.