Twelfth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The cultural and ethnic diversity in most Western countries has significantly increased in the last decades.This increasing diversity has important implications for museums, especially in the urban context. Museums should incorporate the urban super diversity, in terms of composing the collections as well as of attracting diverse groups of visitors. The aim of this project was to examine how multiperspectivity can be an explicit policy strategy for cultural education and how it could be implemented in the collection presentation and public relations of museums in ways that its effects could be measured. According to the principles of design-based research three design teams were established with staffs of three important Antwerp museums, in particular the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA), the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) and the Red Star Line Museum (RSL) as well as researchers from three teacher education programmes, in particular the specific teacher programme in visual arts of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp from the Artesis Plantijn University College and of the specific teacher education programme in history and in behavioral and cultural sciences of the University of Antwerp. Each team was responsible for the analysis of the museum collection from the angle of multiperspectivity and for the development of a policy strategy for multiperspectivity. In our paper we focus on the results of the one-year research project which comes to an end in June 2019.