Excavating Place: How Environmental Ethnography Empowers Audience in Missional Renewal

Innovation Showcase
Patrick Stowe Jones,  Joe Fleischhacker  

Museums pursuing institutional renewal must understand their audience in increasingly nuanced and complex ways. Environmental ethnography is a participatory method of generating audience insight through the lens of human geography and place. By understanding the ties between community and place, museums can clarify their role in creating and sustaining community, and provide exhibits, programming, and outreach that empowers their audience through missional fulfillment. —  The Memphis Museums, a collection of natural and cultural history institutions, faced an imperative to fundamentally reconsider its mission, purpose, and offerings after decades of stasis and dwindling support from visitors and donors. And as a major cultural institution in a southern city which reveres its history, the Memphis Museums also sought to untangle its complicity in the city’s complex social injustices. At the Memphis Museum, leaders engaged IA Collaborative as they embarked on a project of institutional transformation. In order to be the “heartbeat and soul of Memphis” through missional renewal, it wasn’t enough to know their audience; we had to understand how Memphians create community, and employed environmental ethnography as our chief research method. Because place and community are inextricable, both deeply influence the formation and development of museum audiences and, by extension, are foundational to solidifying the role of the museum. Environmental ethnography empowers audience to expose and trace these intersections within a shared social and physical human geography, and in turn generates opportunities for growth and missional advancement that are unique to each institution.