Museum Management and Curatorship

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Curating good participants? Audiences, democracy

and authority in the contemporary museum

Helena Robinson

To cite this article: Helena Robinson (2020) Curating good participants? Audiences, democracy
and authority in the contemporary museum, Museum Management and Curatorship, 35:5,
470-487, DOI: 10.1080/09647775.2020.1803117

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MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP
2020, VOL. 35, NO. 5, 470–487
https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2020.1803117

Curating good participants? Audiences, democracy and

authority in the contemporary museum
Helena Robinson
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Literature, Arts and Media, The University of Sydney, Sydney,
Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Public participation has become axiomatic in contemporary Received 13 April 2020
museum theory and practice. In the absence of consensus about Accepted 27 July 2020
the fundamental principles of participatory museology and what
KEYWORDS
participation looks like in practice, the term is now routinely Participation; new
attached to a heterogenous array of museum-stakeholder museology; museum
interactions. This article interrogates the rhetoric of participatory activism; audience
museology by critically examining its intellectual roots, followed engagement; inclusion;
by a preliminary review of contemporary museum policy and cultural democracy
strategic documents from international and national cultural
bodies to generate a typology of participation in the museum
sector. Taking the findings into account, this article questions
whether New Museology’s desire to empower visitors is genuinely
realised through participatory practices. It concludes by outlining
future research directions that may contribute to greater
understanding of the political and practical implications of
audience participation in the museum context.

Introduction
Public participation in museum programmes was conceived as a central democratising
tactic within the discourses of the New Museology, a movement that came to define inter-
national museological scholarship and professional practice across the latter decades of
the twentieth century. Prior to this, as Tony Bennett persuasively argued in his seminal
book The Birth of the Museum (1995), the institutional logic of the public museum had his-
torically positioned museums as devices for the edification and inculcation of values,
knowledge and behaviours considered widely beneficial for the function of society. In con-
trast, the emancipatory ethos of the New Museology sought to reconstruct the museum
experience as intellectually, culturally and politically egalitarian. By sharing curatorial auth-
ority with those who had traditionally been positioned as passive beneficiaries of museum
programmes, museum theorists and practitioners imagined a reinvented institution where
cultural metanarratives would be replaced by non-hierarchical, dynamic interpretations of
collections (e.g., Rivière 1985; Stam 1993; Davis 2011, 61–64; Shelton 2013). In the 1980s
and 90s, influential museological scholars and professionals championed fundamental

CONTACT Helena Robinson [email protected] Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Lit-
erature, Arts and Media, The University of Sydney, Room 479, Merewether Building H04, Sydney, NSW, Australia
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 471

reforms to museum organisational structures and practices, rejecting the idea of museums
as vehicles for top-down interventionism and replacing legacies of elitism with new com-
mitments to various forms of democratised cultural engagement.
In spite of its variegated usage (Robinson 2017a, 2017b), the concept of participatory
museology signifies the maturation of New Museology into professional codes of ethics
and standardised museum practices. Embracing affiliated discourses around inclusion,
diversity and collaboration, participatory museology rejects the idea of singular insti-
tutional authority in the formation and dissemination of cultural meaning. Instead,
museums are positioned as grassroots organisations that exist for public benefit and are
motivated by the needs and aspirations of their constituent communities. And yet, it is
within this social justice agenda that a (perhaps unintended) paradox emerges. Just as
the traditional museum was designed as a tool for the improvement of the visiting
public in aid of the development of a civil society, there is evidence to suggest that
certain contemporary forms of museum participation are designed to conduce desirable
attitudes and behaviours among museum users and stakeholders. By promoting inclusion
and participation as moral goods without necessarily yielding institutional authority, it is
proposed that museums have been re-inscribed into new forms of governmentality, rep-
rising the museum’s role in constructing the socially acceptable, productive and ethical
citizen.
This article investigates the credibility of this proposition by tracing the genealogy of
participatory museology as an expression of the New Museology movement. By exploring
the intellectual framework of New Museology, it examines the emergence of dual commit-
ments to cultural democracy and social justice, which function as potentially conflicting
motivations for a greater institutional focus on the engagement and participation of
museum publics. Second, it examines the contexts in which participation is invoked in
the contemporary museum sector through a preliminary review of policy and other pro-
fessional literature that uses participation or cultural democracy rhetoric. This analysis is
presented on a spectrum from the least to most participatory (from the expansion of
access to existing collections, to the inclusion of visitors as co-producers of content).
That is, from understandings of ‘participation’ where the museum cedes the least, to
the most, epistemological authority.
The article concludes by considering whether process-driven (culturally democratic)
forms of participatory museology are consistent, or compatible, with outcomes-orientated
(instrumentalist) models. It evaluates the durability of New Museological discourse in the
light of the spectrum of participatory modes of practice, with the intention of sparking
new debate about what constitutes a conceptually, socially and politically desirable role
for museums today.

Participation and the New Museology

Tony Bennett’s landmark work The Birth of the Museum (1995) begins with an excerpt from
an urban plan written in 1849 by English social reformer James Silk Buckingham, linking
the provision of an environment ‘mechanically arranged’ to encourage favourable beha-
viours with the orderly functioning of society. In the excerpt, Buckingham argues that
appropriately organised public spaces and amenities in the model town, when combined
with the right kind of education and training for the population, would ‘have a great
472 H. ROBINSON

influence in the formation of their character, and materially assist at least the development
of the noblest faculties of the mind and heart’ (Buckingham 1849, 224–5 as cited in
Bennett 1995, 17–18).
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s analyses of governmentality and his influential work Dis-
cipline and Punish (1979), Bennett argues that the conventional model of the public
museum, which crystallised in the period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century, developed its institutional character based on, and dedicated to, the manage-
ment and positive transformation of society (1995, 19). Referring to Patrick Colquhoun’s
1795 Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, Bennett proposes that public museums
were conceptualised as tools for promoting self-regulation: ‘to give the minds of the
people a right bias … all Public Exhibitions should be rendered subservient to improve-
ment of morals, and … a reverence and respect for the Laws’ (Colquhoun 1806, 347–8
as cited in Bennett 1995, 19). By the turn of the twentieth century, Bennett argues, cultural
experiences had not only been framed in a governmental context as useful in the self-
inscription of the individual into civil society (1995, 20), but also, as more direct disciplinary
apparatuses for the improvement of public attitudes and manners (2015, 9). His analysis
exposed the hierarchical power relations behind remediating cultural experiences,
which cast the museum as a ‘resource through which those exposed to its influence
would be led to ongoingly and progressively modify their thoughts, feelings and behav-
iour’ (Bennett 1995, 24).
Bennett’s critique of museums as instruments of social conditioning captured the
counter-elitist, democratising ethos of the New Museology movement of the late twenti-
eth century (Halpin 1997; Weil 1999; McCall and Gray 2014). In her 1993 review of New
Museology literature, Deirdre Stam identified the overarching desire of the movement
to unshackle museums from legacies of top-down instrumentalism:
Traditional mission statements, prior to The New Museology, tended to emphasise … the
ameliorating effect of personal development most immediately on private behaviour, and
eventually on social and collective behaviour. (Stam 1993, 276)

Instead, New Museology became an international movement dedicated to reinserting

community ownership and self-determined interpretation of cultural heritage into
museum practice. Combined with postcolonial critiques of unequal power relations in
the traditional museum (with new emphasis on Indigenous agency) and the idea of cul-
tural participation as a pathway to community sustainable development (Davis 2011;
Mayrand 2015), New Museology promoted reflexive, grassroots and more user-centred
museum practice.
In Europe and the Anglophone countries, the New Museology sought to differentiate
itself from the operational emphasis of ‘old’ museology by focusing on the subjectivity
of knowledge creation in the museum, a desire to more holistically represent and
provide access for stakeholder communities, and the idea of sharing curatorial authority
with museum publics (McCall and Gray 2014, 20). In Australia, for example, this ethos
was enshrined in the Collections Council of Australia’s landmark publication Significance
2.0 (Russell and Winkworth 2009) as a best-practice guideline for iterative, consultative
and pluralistic interpretation of collections. According to the authors of this industry stan-
dard, museum interpretation of objects required intellectual humility on the part of
museum professionals and an openness to working with communities to articulate the
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 473

multifaceted meanings of collections, with the imperative that museums remain ‘hospita-
ble to alternative views’ (2009, vii).
Fundamental to this decentralisation of interpretive authority was the idea that the
values of museum objects were unstable, recognising the museum visitor as an active
partner in the construction of museum narratives (Hooper-Greenhill 2000a; Falk 2006;
Doering 2007). A rich literature emerged around the diverse ways in which collections
could be interpreted for meaning (e.g., Schlereth 1982; Lubar and Kingery 1993; Pearce
1994), exposing the different epistemological, disciplinary and institutional contexts for
evaluating museum objects and emphasising their polysemic potential (Hooper-Greenhill
1992). As Sharon Macdonald explained in her Introduction to the influential 2006 Compa-
nion to Museum Studies, New Museology sought to question conventions of museum col-
lection interpretation, seeing the traditional didacticism and disciplinary rigidity of
museums as a symptom of problematic power hierarchies at the wider social level (Mac-
donald 2006, 3). Rather than disseminating predetermined collection narratives for the
betterment of visitors, contemporary museums would unsettle the authorising status of
curatorial decision-making, acting instead as a public sphere to facilitate the exchange
of diverse viewpoints (see Barrett 2011, Chapter 5). In other words, the movement was
underpinned by a democratising ethos seeking not only to make museums more transpar-
ent and accountable, but also to involve those ‘outside’ the museum in processes of cul-
tural interpretation in ways that would acknowledge and productively harness audiences’
meaning-making capacities.
New Museology’s emphasis on the museum as a reservoir of interpretive possibility has
been reflected in conceptually aligned shifts in museum education, which recognise the
active role of the museum visitor in the construction of meaning around objects and
the inherent contingency of collection narratives. Moving away from didactic (knowledge
transfer) models to constructivism (Hein 1996; Black 2005), museum learning became
understood as a dynamic, dialogic and individually differentiated process that positioned
the museum as a site where diverse cultural meanings could be explored and negotiated
(Hooper-Greenhill 2000b; Doering 2007). By acknowledging the plurality of object mean-
ings, museum scholars, educators and practitioners advocated for a redistribution of
power over collection interpretation from the centre (museum/curators) to the margins
(stakeholder communities). Ideally, this would translate into recursive exploration of
object meanings and relationships in collaboration with museum audiences.

Participatory museology and the rebirth of the museum as social reformer

Developing its original egalitarian themes, what could be described as a second phase in
the development of New Museological thinking – the idea of the socially just museum –
grew in prominence around the turn of the twenty-first century, asserting that museums
should not only be representationally flexible (culturally democratic) sites, but institutions
that could be utilised to advance the social, cultural and political aspirations of previously
marginalised groups. As Deirdre Stam (1993) observed, a constellation of potentially desta-
bilising economic, social and philosophical imperatives – including increasing reliance on
private funding, globalised competition for cultural tourism, demands for museums to
reflect the needs and aspirations of diverse (multicultural) audience groups, and the chal-
lenge posed by postmodernism on the status of disciplinary expertise – all contributed to a
474 H. ROBINSON

sense that the institution of the museum required urgent and systemic transformation in
order to remain viable. Social policy trends towards cultural utilitarianism in Anglophone
and European countries, where museums have been enlisted into the service of wider gov-
ernment objectives around economic vitality, urban renewal, health and sustainable
development (Gray 2002; Mulcahy 2006; Gray 2017), saw a return to the idea of
museums as vehicles of social reform.
Most recently, the pursuit of social justice and institutional social responsibility in the
sector (Marstine 2011) positions museums as social agents and enlists stakeholders in par-
ticipatory modes that, arguably, echo the institutionally-driven interpretive practices
against which the original New Museology rebelled. Rather than merely demonstrating
openness to multiple perspectives on collection meanings and values, pluralism in the
form of identity politics–as well as overt attempts to counteract perceived imbalances
in social or cultural influence–have come to characterise a broad swathe of museological
discourse.
According to museum studies scholar Kylie Message (2018), museum and curatorial
activism can be described as a set of conscious decisions and actions on the part of
either individual museum workers, or entire institutions, to effect social change. These
interventions occur along a spectrum beginning with acknowledgement of social move-
ments (intentional political engagement) to deliberately seeking to shape social outcomes
via targeted advocacy through museum programming: ‘Curatorial activism can be under-
stood as attempts by individuals to engage with, represent and often contribute to social
and political protest and reform movements’ (Message 2014, 1). This turn toward a ‘critical
museology’ (Shelton 2013) emphasises the recalibration of power relations and asserts the
legitimacy of underrepresented value systems through the medium of museums’ collec-
tion and educational programmes. Moreover, such programmes are, according to
Message (2014, 4), directed towards an abstract (and often institutionally endorsed)
notion of the ‘public good’.
In this context, the ‘participation paradigm’ cements museums as tools for social
improvement; a positioning that appears to run counter to the original critiques
mounted by the New Museology, and so against the philosophical underpinnings of
much contemporary museum work. As the Danish art historian and curator Stine Høholt
observes, ‘[t]oday it is no longer the nation museums are “building”, but the citizen’
(2017, 24).
The distinction between New Museology’s emphasis on process-driven, constructivist
meaning-making and new, more outcomes-driven interventions, is perhaps best summed
up by prominent museologist Richard Sandell, who has written extensively on the role of
museums in advancing social justice and human rights. The contemporary museum, he
suggests, should ‘be more open to taking sides … [which] requires a refinement of the
idea of the museum as forum … towards the idea of the museum as arbiter’ (Sandell
2017, 148 emphasis in original). In other words, Sandell argues that museums should
leave behind the goal of simply fostering dialogue between competing viewpoints on
interpretation of cultural heritage and its relationship to contemporary social life, in
favour of moral adjudication on the cultural and social issues that matter most (2017,
161). As a statement by Te Papa Tongarewa (New Zealand’s national museum) in support
of the formation of the international Social Justice Alliance of Museums (SJAM) asserts:
‘Our new vision is to change hearts, change minds, and change lives’ (SJAM c.2014).1
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 475

To what extent does the concept of museums as agents of change reinsert museologi-
cal practice into the well-worn groove of the regulating institution that, as highlighted by
Bennett, was designed to ‘to give the minds of the people a right bias’ (Colquhoun 1806,
347–8 as cited in Bennett 1995, 19)? In what ways do institutional agendas for social trans-
formation, to the extent of ‘rewiring [audiences’] brains’2 to induce particular understand-
ings and action on hot-button issues, position museum audiences as recipients rather as
co-creators of meaning? The next part of this article takes up these questions in relation to
the ways in which the contemporary museum sector – including cultural, public and pro-
fessional organisations that influence and channel museum policy – frames museum-sta-
keholder interactions. In particular, this analysis examines policy statements and other
professional literature to determine the explicit, as well as implicit, ways in which the
sector conceptualises the participation of museum stakeholders (a term used interchange-
ably here with ‘visitors’, ‘audiences’, or ‘publics’), as well as evaluating the relative authority
and agency of stakeholders in these interactions.

Methodology: evaluating ‘participation’ in the contemporary museum

sector
In order to gauge the alignment of stakeholder participation with either culturally demo-
cratic or social intervention models of museum provision, a review was conducted on a
preliminary sample of published and professional literature from the European and Anglo-
phone museum sector, dated 1997–2018, which uses the rhetoric of participation. Primary
materials included cultural policy and funding scheme documents, museum strategic
plans and annual reports, conference proceedings, and other professional publications
(reports, websites, blogs).
Intended as a proof of concept to guide more targeted future research on the topic, the
aim of this initial survey was to identify emergent patterns in the ways in which the idea of
participation is articulated within institutional missions, or seen to contribute to the
museum visitor experience, within particular regions, levels of governance, or professional
organisations. The projects, organisations, and programmes included in the sample were
not selected on the basis of a specific or single-minded focus on the participatory para-
digm; indeed, participation or related concepts are often expressed in the context of
what may be wider institutional aims. Rather, the survey focused on the discourses of
decision-making from bodies that have an influence on museum operations at various
levels of administration and practice, with some deference to the Australian sector,
given the local context of the project. Documents produced by transnational institutions
and collectives (such as the Social Justice Alliance of Museums and International Coalition
of Sites of Conscience), whose work often transects these various scales, were also con-
sidered. The initial search was organised according to the following categories:

. International and transnational cultural organisations (e.g., UNESCO, ICOM, European

Commission)
. National authorities: government departments as well as non-government grant-
making bodies (e.g., UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Institute of
Museum and Library Services USA, Australia Council for the Arts, Museums and Galleries
Australia, national museums, etc.)
476 H. ROBINSON

. State and Local authorities and community organisations (state governments, councils,
local government associations, local historical societies, state-run museums, council-run
museums, volunteer-run museums, etc.)
. Materials associated with media commentary or public debate.

Once a selection of over 25 documents had been collated (see Table 1. for full list), the
texts were examined for references to participation, including related terminologies and

Table 1. List of sources considered in review of participatory discourses.

Institution / source Document name Date
International
UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity 2001
UNESCO Report of the Intergovernmental Meeting of Experts (Category II). 2015
Draft Recommendations on the Protection and Promotion of
Museums, their Diversity and their Role in Society
UNESCO Convention on Protection and Promotion of Diversity in Cultural 2005
Expression
ICOM Running a Museum – A Practical Handbook 2004
ICOM ICOM Report on the Working Group on Cross-Cultural Issues – 1997
Museums and Cultural Diversity
ICOM ICOM Strategic Plan 2016–2022 2016
European Union The European Union’s 2015–18 Work Plan for Culture 2014
European Union DIAMOND–Dialoguing Museums for a New Cultural Democracy 2012
Social Justice Alliance of Museums Website and associated documents Accessed
2018
International Coalition of Sites of Website and associated documents Accessed
Conscience 2019
National
Kings College London Towards Cultural Democracy: Promoting cultural capabilities for 2017
everyone
Museums Association (UK) Museums 2020: Discussion paper summary 2012
Museums Association (UK) Museums and Homelessness (website) Accessed
2018
Museums Association (UK) Museums Change Lives 2010
BritainThinks and Museums Public perceptions of – and attitudes to – the purposes of museums 2013
Association (UK) in society: A report prepared by BritainThinks for Museums
Association
Cultural Policy Collective (UK) Beyond Social Inclusion, Towards Social Democracy 2004
Paul Hamlyn Foundation (UK) Our Museum: Communities and Museums as Active Partners Accessed
(website) 2018
Institute of Museums and Library Engaging Communities (report) 2015
Services (IMLS) (USA)
ICOM Australia ICOM Australia (website) Accessed
2018
National Assembly of State Arts Accessibility Planning and Resource Guide for Cultural Administrators 2011
Agencies (NASAA) (USA)
National Assembly of State Arts Design for Accessibility: A Cultural Administrator’s Handbook 2003
Agencies (NASAA) (USA)
National Museum of Australia National Museum of Australia Strategic Plan 2014
National Museum of Australia Understanding Museums 2011
Australia Council for the Arts Connecting Australians: The National Arts Participation Survey 2017
State / local
Western Australian Museum New Museum for WA (website) Accessed
2018
Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project (website) Accessed
2018
Sydney Living Museums Sydney Living Museums (website) Accessed
2018
The Australian Museum The Australian Museum (website) Accessed
2018
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 477

contexts such as democracy, inclusion, co-production and audience empowerment. Rel-

evant documents were then analysed according to the following questions:

. What level of participation is being alluded to: who are the actors and what is the
‘balance of power’ or agency in the way participation is structured?
. What concept of participation, or democratisation, actually appears to be at work (e.g.,
participation as attendance, as two-way communication, as social inclusion, as a form of
civic competence, etc.)?
. What examples are mentioned (i.e., institution / programme, details of project design
and outcomes, etc.)?
. What is the justification given for participatory and/or democratising approaches at the
institution?
. How is participation defined and linked to other policy or social outcomes?
. Who are the articulated beneficiaries of participation?

Finally, the results were organised according to the five categories specified in the
‘spectrum of public participation’ developed in 2015 by the International Association for
Public Participation (IAP2), a global association dedicated to advancing best practice in
public engagement with government, industry and other institutions involved in
decision-making related to the public interest.3 The categories in the spectrum –
Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate and Empower – describe an ascending scale in parti-
cipatory activity.4 Similar scales have been developed within the museological context,
such as Nina Simon’s five stages of social participation for museum visitors (Simon
2010, 91). However, the IAP2 spectrum was deemed more fit for purpose as, like this
research, it is directly concerned with the level of influence that ‘participants’ (stakeholders
outside the institution) exert on institutional decision-making.
As a preliminary study, the limitations of this review include its focus on publicly
available documents that can, inevitably, only provide partial insights into the articu-
lated intent of the selected projects and organisations. Likewise, the analysis can
only examine what has been written about programmes that include a participatory
component, not how such programmes and the public engagements they offer are
actually realised in practice (a fertile area for future empirical research). With these con-
straints in mind, the following section draws out notable patterns in the discourses of
participation identified across the documents, using selected examples to illustrate key
points.

Review findings
In order to get a sense of the landscape of ‘participation’ in the context of contemporary
museums, analysis of a range of sources from the museum and wider cultural sector finds
that organisations have adopted the concept of participation to differing extents. These
sector responses can be understood as occupying a spectrum of participatory engage-
ment: from informing to empowering audiences; from access to knowledge to that of
its coproduction; or, from ‘the democratisation of culture’ to ‘cultural democracy’
(Mulcahy 2006). The distinctions uncovered between levels of stakeholder agency in the
design, development and actualisation of cultural programmes echo comparable shifts
478 H. ROBINSON

in the roles of museums – from public forums to social change agents – that have charac-
terised trends in museological thinking into the twenty-first century.
The meaning of ‘participation’ varies widely across the different documents considered
in this review. At the most moderate end of the IAP2 spectrum, museums maintain their
epistemological authority, ‘informing’ visitor-participants, if often doing so through pro-
grammes to increase visitors’ physical and intellectual access to collections and public pro-
grammes. At the most participatory end of the spectrum, museums cede their
epistemological authority, engaging visitor-participants as co-producers and, ultimately,
as primary producers.

Empower (placing decision-making authority in the hands of participants;

implementing their decisions)
If we take IAP2’s terms as read, full empowerment should ‘place final decision making in
the hands of the public’. Of the documents reviewed in this research, only the UK Cultural
Policy Collective’s ‘Beyond Social Inclusion, Towards Social Democracy’ position paper
(2004) approaches this level of participant agency. With an intent to facilitate grassroots,
collective cultural production, it argues that cultural diversity and social inclusion dis-
courses in the cultural sector are in fact market-led attempts to bolster institutional
reach, rather than genuine examples of cultural democracy. The paper’s argument
remains, however, largely conceptual, offering little guidance on how participant-led cul-
tural production can be realised in practice.
This raises the question of whether ‘participation’ in the contemporary museum sector
can ever be achieved at this end of the spectrum. To a degree, pragmatism dictates that
museums must maintain considerable autonomy and authority in cultural production,
insofar as institutional imperatives – such as maintaining collections, facilities, institutional
collaborations and funding streams – compete with and limit the potential for participant-
led activities (Robinson 2017a). As others have noted (Høholt 2017, 30–31), audience par-
ticipation is ‘always formatted’ to the extent that it is still expected to take place within the
professional structure of the museum environment. At its greatest extent, then, the sug-
gestion that museums should invite and enable full participation from visitors is in fact
self-contradictory, since it gestures toward an ideal image of participation while necess-
arily constraining the participation within the institutional parameters of the museum.

Collaborate (partnering with participants in decision-making; co-creating

solutions); Involve (consistently communicating to understand and respond to
participant needs)
For a number of organisations in the sample, participation is framed quite clearly as copro-
duction (understood here as straddling the Involve and Collaborate categories in the IAP2
spectrum). In this case, museum audiences take part in the process of cultural creation and
meaning-production while institutions maintain a degree of authority.
The UK Museums Association’s Museums 2020 campaign, for example, speaks of visitors
as providers rather than receivers of information: no longer ‘occasionally consulted consu-
mers’ but active participants in the museum’s production (Museums Association 2012, 10).
Related initiatives, such as the UK Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Our Museum: Communities
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 479

and Museums as Active Partners (2012–2015),5 emphasise the importance of museums

sharing epistemological authority and collaborating with community groups. The reposi-
tioning of museum as ‘partner’ is a core concept here, signalling shared production, but
also – as a separate if perhaps related imperative – addressing the social needs of partner-
ing communities. The website of Our Museum suggests that ‘genuine participation
involves sharing decision-making and power; acting and creating together’ (Paul
Hamlyn Foundation c.2018). However, the website text attaches this to the instrumental
role that museums can play:
… in developing community skills, capabilities and creativity: preparing and helping people to
be engaged in their communities, to articulate their voices, to find employment or volunteer-
ing opportunities in the heritage sector and elsewhere. (ibid)

In a similar way, ‘Towards Cultural Democracy: Promoting cultural capabilities for every-
one’, a UK cultural policy report and strategy paper written by King’s College researchers
Wilson, Gross, and Hull (2017), emphasises the value of grassroots cultural creativity as the
cornerstone of cultural democracy. The authors argue that cultural institutions should
provide opportunities for people to engage in creative cultural activity in order to stimu-
late broader democratic engagement. Paradoxically, the focus on developing cultural
capability as a catalyst for civic participation belies an instrumentalist motive, whereby
people’s participation in cultural life takes place within the context of a ‘higher’, institution-
ally-authored purpose.
On a transnational level, the ICOM Working Group on Cross Cultural Issues (1997) con-
ceptualises the participatory dynamic in contemporary museology as conducive to social
inclusion, but also as part of the museum’s search for relevance at the turn of a new mil-
lennium. Articulated beneficiaries of the participatory museum are new visitors and cul-
tural groups, but also a museum sector that can demonstrate its relevance and value by
addressing the needs of an increasingly diverse contemporary society. With a similar
instrumentalist bent, the European Commission’s Dialoguing Museums for a New Cultural
Democracy (DIAMOND) programme (2012–2014) harnesses museums as conduits for
social inclusion and increased civic competence (Da Milano and Falchetti 2013). Here, par-
ticipation via collaborative digital storytelling serves as a means of self-expression for
museum audiences, providing opportunities for increased digital literacy, lifelong learning,
and social interaction for ‘disadvantaged adults’.
The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (ICSC),6 which has over 230 member
organisations in 55 countries, represents a network of cultural institutions with an openly
instrumentalist take on participation. By interpreting traumatic and difficult histories with
the explicit purpose of effecting social justice in the present, the ICSC claims ‘[w]e turn
memory into action’. Institutions affiliated with the ICSC include museums, but also
heritage sites and cultural programmes united by the conviction that a kind of
managed collaboration with victims of discrimination and war, often by developing oppor-
tunities for these stakeholders to share personal experiences, can promote mutual under-
standing and advance human rights.
Taken together, these examples of the Collaborate and Involve sections of the IAP2
spectrum illustrate a shared commitment to participant autonomy, but this still occurs
within the ambit of institutional intent. Here, museums (and other cultural organisations)
orchestrate participation and maintain clear objectives for its outcomes. What is
480 H. ROBINSON

noteworthy is the repositioning of the museum at the intersection of debate and activism
around human rights, and the incorporation of voices to propel the stated advocacy
agenda of these organisations.

Consult (seeking participant feedback and communicating its impact on

decision-making)
In the sample examined for this research, efforts to Consult with participants overlap with
the Involve category. Some institutions are clearly commited to sustained and structured
engagement with communities, but the impact of consultation on decision-making is less
clearly articulated. For example, the redevelopment of the Western Australian Museum
(due to open in 2020) is driven by a ‘People First’ philosophy that prioritises ‘providing
meaningful and ongoing opportunities for the people of WA to have input into the
content and visitor experiences.’7 There is clear value placed on the processes of public
discussion, debate and network-building to inform the design and content of the new
museum, although the institution sets up the structure and communication mechanisms
of the consultation. For example, the museum has created advisory panels to represent the
voices of the Western Australian population, where particpant ideas and feedback are fed
into decision-making. According to the wording of the museum’s ‘Project Aspirations’, the
panels can both generate their own ideas for the new museum or evaluate proposals
offered by the institution, even though the extent to which the resulting guidance will
impact on the final product is not specified:
To gather specific feedback and ideas, the WA Museum has established four community
panels that provide ongoing input into the New Museum development. The panel
members come from all over the State and have a range of backgrounds and skills. They
meet up to four times per year to discuss content and visitor experiences in the New
Museum. (Government of Western Australia c.2018)

Other organisations also signal respect for, and a desire to properly represent, different
cultural and community groups, although this effort springs from a concern with increas-
ing the opportunities to ‘inform’. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) Key Con-
cepts of Museology (Desvallées and Mairesse 2010) and the ICOM Strategic Plan 2016–
2022 (2016), for instance, express strong commitment to responding to the expectations
and needs of increasingly diverse audiences (including those who might typically experi-
ence difficulties in physically attending museums), but this is geared toward expanding
the accessibility and reach of educational programmes rather than, specifically, diversify-
ing interpretations of museum collections.

Inform (providing information that helps stakeholders understand issues,

opportunities or solutions)
Documents from libraries occupied the less radical end of the spectrum, having an explicit
focus on providing access to knowledge and, with this, assisting in people’s social and cul-
tural literacies. The Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) in the USA, for
example, writes of how their work provides migrants with the linguistic and other practical
tools required to navigate their new society (IMLS 2015). While valuable work, this con-
ception of participation is a good example of how the ‘access’ rhetoric can often only
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 481

mean greater contact with existing knowledge, with no sharing of authority over what that
knowledge might be. Here, libraries are sites of training, building competence in the par-
ticipant who is still a passive beneficiary.
While these public service notions of ‘participation as access’ may be relatively uncon-
troversial in the case of libraries, they highlight the limited degree of participation within
some other institutional documents. Publications such as the USA’s National Assembly of
State Arts Agencies’ (NASAA) Accessibility planning and resource guide for cultural adminis-
trators (2011) and Design for Accessibility: A Cultural Administrator’s Handbook (2003) do not
destabilise the institution so much as seek to expand its reach.
Some of the documents surveyed express their organisation’s intentions around out-
reach programmes in ways that are not necessarily participatory at all, in the sense of
sharing epistemological authority or inserting participants into decision-making. Rather,
as with programmes to enhance ‘access’, they can be even more instructive through
their intention to bring about certain outcomes. For example, the UK Museum Associ-
ation’s Museums Change Lives document (2013), emphasises the social and employment
skills gained by users of museum programmes. Participants here are not necessarily
engaged in the coproduction of knowledge or exhibitions, so much as being transformed
by their engagement with the museum’s work. This is not to diminish the value of
museums’ role in supporting communities as a kind of institutional social worker.
However, the museums have not exactly ceded authority to the community through
these activities; they become different kinds of leaders, equipping ‘participants’ to be
engaged citizens through interventions to increase participants’ civic competence, pro-
ductivity, and quality of life.
Finally, it is interesting to consider some of the paradoxes that emerge when consider-
ing the basic premise of participation in the IAP2 spectrum in relation to museums. For the
Inform category, where participants are deemed to have the least influence on insti-
tutional decision-making, the IAP2 includes the qualification that information provided
to the public should be ‘balanced and objective’.8 This instruction would seem to preclude
and organisation from communicating information that is specifically crafted to bring
about particular (predetermined) responses in participants and audiences. In other
words, even though the Inform category retains the institution’s authority in disseminating
information to stakeholders who are positioned as recipients rather than participants,
there is an implied responsibility on the institution to present multiple perspectives and
evidence. It is therefore questionable whether certain forms of participatory museology,
particularly examples of museum activism – where organisations seek to bring about atti-
tudinal or behavioural change in audiences by privileging the communication of certain
bodies of information or political viewpoints – meet the basic threshold of ‘public
participation’.

Discussion
What do the results of this preliminary review tell us about how participation is being used
in practice, as compared to the ways in which stakeholder engagement and influence is
positioned in policy, strategy and other documents? It is important to acknowledge that
these sources provide a limited window into ground-level museum practices, where the
individual ‘performance’ of policy by street-level practitioners may be at variance with
482 H. ROBINSON

institutional direction (Lipsky 1980). This highlights an opportunity for further empirical
study to examine how institutional discourses of participatory museology are realised in
actual curatorial and collection practices, educational programmes, and other audience
engagement activities.
Intriguingly, however, what this preliminary review indicates is that those organis-
ations that are most concerned with their function in working towards ‘social inclusion’
or building civic competence for stakeholders are, in fact, those which appear to cede
the least epistemological or decision-making authority to visitor-participants. In these
instances, the institution may have undergone a transformation of its primary (collec-
tions-focused) role and may now be constructed more as ‘social worker’ than
interpreter of cultural materials. Within this context, the function of the museum to
transform the visitor is more enhanced and explicit than ever before. As Richard
Sandell notes, it is not necessarily the mechanisms of the traditional instrumentalism
of museums that are seen as problematic, but rather the specific ends to which the
interventionist model was historically put:
Historical analyses of the museum’s agency have tended to highlight their capacity to control,
to civilise the citizenry and to exclude, marginalise or silence minority groups through rep-
resentational practices which operate to produce oppressive and discriminatory effects …
[but] the narratives which museums construct and present nevertheless play a part in
shaping normative truths and social relations, as well as framing the ways in which visitors
and society more broadly view and discuss contemporary social and moral issues. (Sandell
2011, 135)

According to this line of thinking, the morally rehabilitated and ethically recalibrated
museum can, and should, deploy its technologies of persuasion towards achieving the atti-
tudinal and behavioural changes necessary to bring about a more just society. In matters
of cultural interpretation, where nothing less than the moral well-being of society is per-
ceived to be at stake, activist museology may, therefore, resist forms of participation where
the museum visitor is given the freedom to judge the legitimacy of differing standpoints
for themselves (Sandell 2017, 148).
While greater ‘accessibility’ or the social functions of the museum might change the
identity and role of the institution, they do not necessarily translate into a handover of
authority to communities in the sense of cultural democracy. In the example of UK
Museum Association’s Museums Change Lives campaign (2013), it appears that the
newly conceived museum retains even more authority than before, since it is now sup-
posed to intervene in the longer-term life development of audiences (rather than
simply for the course of a discrete museum visit). Within this model, the locus of improve-
ment is not the institution, but the visitors – now reconceived as participants.
It is important to note that foregrounding the utility-value of museums is often a stra-
tegic defence against declining funding and questions surrounding museums’ contempor-
ary relevance (Robinson 2018). Yet, indications that museum publics are ambivalent about
the desirability of overt institutional activism justify a level of caution around the extent to
which museums assume a much more explicit role in shaping social relations and norms. A
2013 survey of museum visitors across six museum venues across the UK, commissioned
by the Museums Association, challenged the notion that public stakeholders want
museums to promote politically-driven viewpoints:
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 483

This is not to say that people felt museums cannot broach controversial subjects, but … rather
than act as a leader in telling people what to think … The public want to keep their trust in
museums by believing they are being given unbiased and non-politically driven information.
(BritainThinks and Museums Association 2013, 6)

The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s wide-ranging Cultural Value Project con-
cluded there was very little concrete evidence of the effectiveness of museum pro-
grammes promoting behavioural and attitudinal change among audiences (Crossick
and Kaszynska 2016, 7), while an informal survey of US citizens on the topic of museum
activism by international consortium MuseumNext (2017) found that only 27.5% of
respondents were in favour of museums having an opinion on social issues. This early evi-
dence suggests that museum activism could inadvertently undermine the sustainability of
museums by eroding public trust or even alienating certain groups of visitors.
As the IAP2 spectrum reveals, the intent to achieve social inclusion and build
civic competence does not necessarily result in participatory forms that would be
classified as the most culturally democratic. It is not the intention of this article to assess
the relative importance or value of these priorities. A museum stating its instrumental
aim may be an example of an institution rising to social obligation, or fulfilling expectations
of how it might justify ongoing public funding. It does not, however, necessarily exemplify
the coproduction of meaning or transfer of epistemological authority foreshadowed by
Bennett’s (1995) critique of traditional museums as tools of social regulation.

Conclusion
The New Museology was always a political movement, but its philosophical premise was,
arguably, never fully resolved. On the one hand New Museology emphasised the demo-
cratisation of museum processes (i.e., participation) by ceding authority to museum
publics. On the other hand, nested within this egalitarian desire to engage and involve,
the movement retained a clear focus on achieving particular social justice outcomes,
such as the decolonisation of collections and giving a voice to disadvantaged minority
groups, with the idea that grassroots participation could be an instrument for positive
social transformation and the building of civic competence.
The philosophical discord between these bifurcated approaches – one process-driven,
the other intentional in its clear expectation of outcomes – appears to have not been fully
acknowledged or settled within the museological literature. This conceptual ambivalence
manifests in diverse interpretations of what ‘participation’ means, and looks like, it the
museum context (e.g., Robinson 2017a, 2017b).
The preliminary review of museum-related sources in this article indicates that, in cases
where ‘access’ and ‘social inclusion’ concerns are most explicit, the museum is least likely
to yield its epistemological authority and is, instead, often reconfiguring its institutional
approach as one with explicit and planned social outcomes. In these instances, power
remains centralised within the institution and participation becomes a vehicle for the
reform of the visitor which, in its outcomes-driven logic, often runs counter to the original
ideals of New Museology.
By departing from the idea that museums should function as a democratic forum
(Barrett 2011), the ‘activist’ bent of participatory museology instead reprises the instru-
mental (and, arguably, disciplinary) tactics that were, not so long ago, the object of
484 H. ROBINSON

museological critique. Museums are again conceptualised as effective tools in the delivery
of particular social and political interventions. In contrast to the concept of cultural democ-
racy that aims for a genuine release of power by institutions (Wilson, Gross, and Hull 2017),
the museum judges which cultural interpretations, social causes and moral standpoints
are worthy of presentation, and packages these for the broadest (most inclusive) access
by diverse audience groups.
This is the paradox and tyranny of participation: its democratising agenda becomes
merely rhetorical as soon as the promise of egalitarian access and shared authority is con-
strained by a unilaterally determined set of social outcomes. Such contradictions call for
deeper study of the motivations, agencies and ideological permutations that underpin
participatory and, indeed, activist museology, as well as the extent to which such insti-
tutional motivations accord with public expectations of museum provision. Such an inves-
tigation could also include fine-grained empirical study of the extent to which certain
forms of audience participation enact cultural democracy on the ground, through the
development and delivery of collection-based programmes.

Notes
1. SJAM Social Justice Alliance of Museums. c.2014. ‘Museums.’ Social Justice Alliance of
Museums. https://sjam.org/who-we-are/museum-members/
2. Hebert-Daly, E. 2017. ‘Museums have a fundamental role in reshaping the world.’ Coalition of
Museums for Climate Justice. https://coalitionofmuseumsforclimatejustice.wordpress.com/
2017/11/07/museums-have-a-fundamental-role-in-reshaping-the-world-an-ally-writes/
3. International Association for Public Participation (IAP2). c.2020. IAP2: About Us (website).
Denver: International Association for Public Participation. https://www.iap2.org/page/about
4. See https://www.iap2.org/ for the IAP2 website, and https://iap2.org.au/wp-content/uploads/
2020/01/2018_IAP2_Spectrum.pdf for the IAP2 Spectrum. The Spectrum was approved by the
IAP2 Board in 2015.
5. Paul Hamlyn Foundation. 2011. Our Museum: Communities and Museums as Active Partners.
http://ourmuseum.org.uk/
6. International Coalition for Sites of Conscience: celebrationg 20 years of memory to action
(website). New York: International Coalition for Sites of Conscience. https://www.
sitesofconscience.org/en/home/
7. Government of Western Australia. c.2018. New Museum for WA: Project Aspirations (website).
Retrieved from: http://museum.wa.gov.au/newmuseum/project-aspirations.
8. See IAP2 Spectrum of Participation: https://iap2.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2018_
IAP2_Spectrum.pdf.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dr Christen Cornell for her research assistance on this project. I also thank the IAP2
International Federation for permission to use the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney: [Research Incu-
bator Scheme 2018].
 MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 485

Notes on contributor
Helena Robinson is a Museum Studies scholar whose research explores the construction of values
and significance around cultural collections within the broader context of the museum as a
complex system for meaning-making. Her current research investigates the idea of cultural democ-
racy and stakeholder participation in curatorial projects, as well as the convergence of museums,
libraries and archives and the impact of integrated institutional structures on the interpretation of
museum collections. At the University of Sydney she is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Education
with the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor-Education and an Honorary Associate with the Depart-
ment of Art History.

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