Whose Voice?
“Rediscovering an American Community of Color”: A Case Study of the Challenges of Inclusivity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Janette Thomas Greenwood, Nancy Kathryn Burns
“Rediscovering an American Community of Color: The Photographs of William Bullard, 1897-1917,” opened at the Worcester (Massachusetts) Art Museum in October 2017. Featuring over eighty recently-discovered portraits of African Americans and Native Americans, taken by a white photographer, this exhibition created numerous challenges and offers an especially valuable case study through which to explore issues of inclusivity. Co-curators Nancy Kathryn Burns and Janette Thomas Greenwood will discuss their experiences overcoming the historical mistrust of the museum among local people of color, incorporating the community as stakeholders in the exhibition, including the voices of family members whose ancestors were represented in the exhibition, and developing a website to incorporate a new technological platform, allowing the content of exhibition to have a life beyond the walls of the museum and establish an ongoing connection to the community.
Playful Inclusion and Emancipatory Practices: Enhancing Life Experience Narratives in Exhibition-oriented Workshops
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katarzyna Wolanik Boström
This paper discusses museum practices aiming at new forms of engagement, inclusion, and social emancipation of visitors by enhancing interactions between current exhibitions and the visitors' own life experiences, expressed in narratives. The point of departure is a series of workshops at the regional Västerbottens Museum's (Umea, Sweden), investigated with ethnographic methods, including participant observation, conversations, and in-depth interview. Regional museums are traditionally repositories of canonical culture and historical knowledge, but in Västerbottens Museum, there is a pronounced shift towards "narrative" as a crucial and omnipresent human practice, with deeper political and ideological significances. Reaching little represented and seldom participating groups lie at the very heart of the museum's pedagogical stance and activities. The creative, life-narrative workshops are explicitly conveying a wish for combining traditional exhibitions with more interactive engagement from the visitors to create their own meanings. A policy is to offer two to three hours day-time workshops in order to reach people who do not usually attend exhibitions, e.g. unemployed, retired, on disability pensions, etc. The workshops are even offered in cross connections with educational institutions, to school classes and courses for recently arrived migrants. The visitors are, in playful and respectful forms, given the task to use their own life experiences to tell stories, "real," semi-fictional, or poetic, in interaction with an exhibition. They engage in a non-prestigious, exhibition-inspired narrating with a self-biographical basis and personal reflections. The aim is thus not only speaking "to" but also "with" the visitors, and to listen respectfully.
La Ronda: Voicing Assonant Expressions of Genízaro indigeneity at the Smithsonian
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gregorio Gonzales
Leading to the Smithsonian’s institution-wide celebration of Christopher Columbus’s fortuitous face-planting into the Western hemisphere, curators and administrators at the institution’s National Museum of American History sought to develop an exhibit capable of representing the State of New Mexico as an ideal space for subsuming the histories and legacies of Spanish colonialism and Indigenous peoplehood into a distinctly American narrative. Museum staffers in Washington indeed worked diligently to narrate this national imaginary wherein the cultural persistence of non-white societies could be effectively communicate American values of cultural diversity, pluralism, and tolerance to an increasingly diverse U.S. public. Utilizing Pueblo Indian and nuevomexicano cultural patrimonies as the representational arbiters for this project, curators were equally forced to qualify these pre-American cultural histories and legacies with their historical, political, social, and cultural complexities. Like their counterparts in the private sector, Smithsonian cultural policymakers would ultimately outsource this intellectual labor by contracting local consultants to collect cultural materials and memories from their own communities. Ironically, it would be one of these cultural fieldworkers who consistently undermined the exhibit’s conceptual integrity by purposefully injecting nonrecognized Indigenous - in this case, Genízaro--perspectives into his work for the Smithsonian. It is with this body of knowledge which this paper intends to think with to consider both the pitfalls and possibilities of museological, archival, and ethnographic methods in relation to Genízaro modes of knowledge acquisition, production, and dissemination which manifest within the very spaces where they should not, but do nonetheless.
English As An International Language On Museum Websites: How Readable And Accessible Can It Be To A Multicultural Audience?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chiara Bartolini
Museums strive to be a platform open to multilingual audiences, both to accommodate international tourism and to situate themselves in a linguistically diverse society. In this scenario, the web may be an ideal medium to promote collections and activities more broadly and reach new, diverse audiences. European university museums mainly use English on their institutional websites to engage with an international audience and the content provided in English is expected to cater to a culturally-unspecified readership. A question arises on the extent to which those materials “translate” for and are felt as readable and “inclusive” by a broad range of users, including people who may not consider English their first language. Although a large body of literature has investigated communication on the web focusing on how to improve readability, little research has considered how to make online texts in English readable, accessible, and appealing to a multicultural audience. This study seeks to investigate how university museums in Europe use the English language on their websites to cater to audiences with different language skills. First, semi-structured interviews with some members of the staff of a selection of museums reveal processes and strategies behind the production of website texts in English. Second, a sample of texts are analysed by drawing on readability and web writing theories. Results provide insights on the extent to which monolingual online texts are written to be appropriate and appealing to a diversified multilingual audience.
