Museum Innovation

Building More Equitable, Relevant and Impactful Museums

Haitham Eid, Melissa Forstrom, Haitham Eid, Melissa Forstrom

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367481407
• eBook ISBN: 9781000402643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Museum Innovation encourages museums to critically reflect upon current practices and adopt new approaches to their civic responsibilities. Arguing that museums have a moral duty to perform, the book shows how social innovation can make them more equitable, relevant and impactful institutions.

Including contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, practitioners and researchers, the book investigates the innovative approaches museums are taking to address contemporary social issues. The volume focuses on the concept of social innovation and individual chapters address a range of crucial issues, such as climate change; the COVID-19 pandemic; diversity and inclusion; the travel ban; and the repatriation of museum collections. Exploring the impact that organizational structures have on museums' aspirations to act as agents for social change, the book also unpacks how museums can establish sustainable relationships with minority communities. Proposing steps that museums can take to affirm their relevance as viable community partners, the book breaks down silos and connects ideas across different areas of museum work.

Museum Innovation explores the role of contemporary museums in society. It is essential reading for academics, students and practitioners working in the museum and heritage studies field. The book's interdisciplinary nature makes it also an interesting read for those working in business studies, digital humanities, visual culture, arts administration and political science fields.

PART I

Innovation in museum collections, narratives and exhibitions

DOI: 10.4324/9781003038184-1

1

YOUTH AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AT THE AMGUEDDFA CYMRU – NATIONAL MUSEUM WALES

Jade Baurley and Sarah Younan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003038184-2

Creative and empowering youth engagement can be a vital component of museology and museum education because it can drive forward socially engaged museum practice and help museums have a greater societal impact, which we consider to be an important element of the civic mission of museums. This chapter investigates how youth-led environmental activism at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales (AC) helped to drive forward and implement change. This chapter focuses on the development and execution of No Môr Plastic (NMP), a youth-designed and youth-led intervention of marine gallery spaces between July 31 and August 12, 2018 to tie in with Maritime Awareness week. For NMP, the young people decided to take on the topic of plastic pollution, which was achieved through working collaboratively with the community-led charity Surfers Against Sewage and the locality of the South Wales beaches where the trash was collected. This project was part of Hands on Heritage (HoH), the Wales-based strand of the National Heritage Lottery (HLF) funded Kick the Dust project, aimed at increasing engagement of young people within museum spaces with a focus on empowerment, creating change and increasing diversity.

This chapter explores the work that underpinned the NMP intervention and the co-productive approaches that were used. For NMP, key staff worked closely with the youth forum (YF), a pre-existing youth engagement group established by the learning department in 2014 but who did not have decision-making powers or influence. The innovation that frames this discussion is the experimentation conducted with key staff in AC to plan and execute the NMP intervention with young people in the lead. Counter to traditional museum exhibition planning, museum staff followed the wishes and ideas of young people, handing over ownership and control. We are interested in the potential shift of authority and influence to community groups and its influence on the social future of museums.

A gap exists in research concerning empowering youth engagement practices within museum spaces. This is partially because academic research on these spaces often focuses on the facilitator perspectives of workshops (Burritt, 2018; Surface and Ryan, 2018) which, although valuable, can risk neglecting the relationship that young participants have with museum spaces and can de-emphasize their potential for autonomous action and production. Laurajane Smith, a heritage and museum studies scholar, argues that audiences and participants are not “empty vessels” that enter museums with the intention of being “filled up” with culture, and if this is not recognized there is a potential detriment to the field of knowledge (2006, p.32). As such, within our own work, we aim to focus awareness on the participants’ subjective realities and consider how their individual life experiences motivate them towards building a relationship with museum sites.

Research by cultural policy academics such as Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett (2010; 2020) considers the potential of culture and heritage to enable social change and its subsequent reflection in cultural policy. What is striking about their research is the acknowledgement that heritage and culture has equal potential to harm as well as to benefit. This is especially relevant to museum practices, as the current norm can be a deficit-approach to audience diversity and equalities (2020, p.394). This behaviour assumes that groups that are in the minority of museum audiences such as young people and other minoritized communities require assimilation into the museum’s intended delivery, rather than encouraging museum staff to address the inequalities and power dynamics within their spaces (Smith, 2006; Belfiore, 2020). To change this requires large-scale and long-term action, structural and cultural change. The HoH projects aim to address issues of power imbalance and institutional culture by focusing on empowering young people, an audience museums often consider “difficult to engage.” Instead of this traditional top-down approach to cultural engagement, HoH takes a grassroots approach with key museum staff members acting as supporters and enablers as opposed to decision makers, and thus putting more power in the hands of people and communities that are stakeholders in museums, but haven’t traditionally been empowered audiences.

Museum sites offer unique challenges and opportunities for engagement. They are geographically bound in the local community but they can house national and international grand narratives. This interplay of scale has been considered by Paul Widdop and David Cutts (2012) and David Harvey (2015) as an under-researched facet of museum participation and engagement. Cutts and Harvey consider the importance of geographical as well as metaphysical “place” (i.e. identity, memory and culture) as important elements in the critical impact of heritage on audiences. Place, especially for museum audiences, matters, both in its physical location as well as its embeddedness in the local community and are the narratives that are presented grand and nationalistic, or are they based on local cultural memory? We understand this in relation to our sites, which span seven locations across Wales and present unique opportunities and challenges as the tone of these narratives varies considerably. The HoH project spans all locations, but each site has a different relationship with its local community based on the place-based narratives in each site that often require tweaking the practical approach to empowering audiences. The NMP intervention which this text investigates responded in particular to the physical location and infrastructures of the National Museum Cardiff, in particular its natural history displays. The placement of NMP within a specific time frame was also of importance; the intervention was timed to coincide with the Welsh Year of the Sea¹, ² (2018) and Maritime Awareness Week (June 23–30) in particular. Finally, at the time, protests by the environmentalist group Extinction Rebellion took place in front of the National Museum on a public field and were attended by many members of staff as well as the youth forum. All these factors combined helped to place the NMP intervention and shape the identity of this project.

Museums can be thought of as community platforms for young people to experience and enact their citizenship (Paynter et al., 2018). This approach recognizes the varied values that museums offer and contain as sites of memory and identity, while providing a method for which young people can be heard. This directly challenges the typical audience/viewer relationship in museums by encouraging young people to use the space. We have been inspired by authors such as Emma Waterton who actively researches and challenges the established approaches to heritage and inclusion and considers the power relations at play within museums (2011). This research develops and informs internal practices so that it can evolve to create social sites of activism.

The No Môr Plastic intervention

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum of Wales (AC) green-lit an experimental large-scale project in youth work with the launch of its National Heritage Lottery funded Hands on Heritage project in 2017. Hands on Heritage is the Welsh strand of a UK-wide ambitious four-year project by the National Heritage Lottery Fund aiming to empower young people and get them involved in the Heritage sector.

The aims of the project include creating new opportunities for young people, and empowering them to actively reshape heritage content, spaces and institutions, providing young people access and ownership of the museum and involving young people in governance and decision making. The project aims to be sensitive to the barriers to participation that young people can face in traditional museum engagement as well as providing richer engagement opportunities that put power in the hands of young people. As discussed earlier, an important element of HoH is giving young people status and power within museum spaces that have not traditionally been enjoyed by this demographic.

The HoH project launched with a series of creative workshops that encouraged young people to informally express their ideas, interests and opinions. Very quickly, themes important to young people began to crystalize from these creative consultation activities; LGBTQ+ experiences, social justice, lived experiences throughout the ages and, at the very top of the list, environmental challenges. To take this theme forward and pilot new ways of working with young people in museum spaces the NMP intervention was launched in 2018. This was the first grassroots activist and artistic intervention initiated by and realized with young people in the museum galleries at AC. To give the intervention a national context and make it pertinent, it was installed in time for Maritime Awareness Week 2018.

This project was innovative for AC practice as it put decision making in the hands of young people. From the outset, the project was designed and driven directly by the young people involved through the museum’s youth forum; a bi-weekly gathering of young people interested in heritage established in 2014, but had not previously been able to influence practice or gallery outcomes. The subject of the intervention was chosen, developed and executed by the young people with the assistance of curators and technical staff. The project put young people in the lead and gave them decision-making power within the museum space with the support of key staff members.

Prior to NMP, the YF would often be asked to help with the seasonal exhibitions, but these were often prescriptive and gave little chance for the young people to have ownership over the outcome. It is important to note that museum staff were equally as invested as young people in platforming content around plastic pollution, and that without the help of key museum staff, the youth forum’s museum intervention would not have been possible. The youth forum wanted to bring contemporary issues into the museum space. Through a combination of timing, funding and institutional willingness for change, the youth-led NMP intervention became possible.

The name of the project is a combination of Welsh and English. “Môr” means “sea” in Welsh; the title is a play on words, which can be read as “No More Plastic” and “No Sea Plastic.” The name was workshopped by the young people involved during a YF session, where many names were discussed and selected by the young people by the end. This name was well received by the public and gallery staff, however, it did receive some criticism from the museum’s Welsh Language Officer due to the potential of the name to be seen as derogatory to Welsh culture. It was against museum practice to “mix” Welsh and English language elements. However, the museum decided to take this risk and the hybrid title was well received, leading the museum to loosen its restrictions on the use of blended language.

Working with community partners to complete the intervention

During YF meetings starting in December 2017, young people expressed the wish for the project to have contemporary significance to their peers, and to the wider public, and to be part of a greater environmental movement. This meant there were six months between initial concept discussions and realization of the intervention. Due to a truncated timeline, museum staff realized that traditional approaches of gallery curation and exhibition were not fit for purpose and began considering innovative approaches. This included the realization that the process for rehanging and rearranging gallery displays required too much internal work and were not processes that the young people could directly engage with. Due to this, a decision was made early on that the intervention would add to existing displays that were low risk to the permanent displays. The display would be aided by a small team of key curators and gallery conservators, keeping personnel costs low. The YF also decided that they wanted other young people to contribute, but they understood the barriers that some young people face, such as lack of time, lack of mone...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Innovation in museum collections, narratives and exhibitions
• PART II: Innovation in digital
• PART III: Innovation in diversity and inclusion practices
• PART IV: Institution-wide innovation
• Index