Developing Engagement
Community Representation, Social Cohesion, and Museums: Audience Engagement in Bath, Bristol, and LA View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Rolfe
This paper is a PhD research project developed with the school of Writing, Publishing & the Humanities at Bath Spa University. The project is a cross-comparison research project between the three museums of The Roman Baths (Bath, UK), M-Shed (Bristol, UK) and LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes (Los Angeles). With the comparison of community engagement, representation and internal management practices, this project shows the value of sharing knowledge of engagement practices between museums. The approach of this research involves three participant groups, Museum Professionals, External Professionals and Community Members, where all participant groups are treated equally and are interviewed with the same questions on engagement, representation, and museum development, resulting in each museum receiving an evaluative report on current community practice. By using this approach, the project seeks to identify how greater community involvement within self-evaluation processes can help museums develop a more strategic offering toward sustainable community development. The result of this work indicates that to achieve better practices of community engagement and representation museum professionals need to be better equipped when working with communities in a more facilitatory way, whilst being able to articulate their successes for further support and funding. Finally, the project concludes with a toolkit and best practices designed for museum professionals when developing more collaborative and sustainable methods of community engagement, representation, and self-evaluation.
The Inclusive Way as an Alternative Museum: Confluences of Tactical Museologies and Artistic Practices of Emergency View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gerardo A. Zavarce, Andreina Fuentes
This paper delves into the experiences of the Inclusive Way Museum, which is focused on generating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by experimenting, documenting, and creating archives of artistic practices. The researcher Reinaldo Laddaga describes these experiences as Estéticas de la Emergencia (Art of Emergency), which are cultural ecologies or experimental communities that use contemporary strategies of participation to construct democratic alternatives and develop new narratives and emergent memory forms. These experiences aim to pursue the common good, re-imagine human rights, and activate the construction of new forms of citizenship. The notion of tactical museologies proposed by Gustavo Buntinx and Ivan Kamp becomes a key category for interpreting the Inclusive Way Museum. Tactical museologies suggest that the museum idea can be a significant factor in the creation and consolidation of communities, but it can also be subject to debate or questioning in that process. In the case of the Inclusive Way Museum, the museum idea is conceived and articulated through artistic practices, with diverse communities responding to crisis and emergency contexts. The confluence between Tactical Museologies and Aesthetics of Emergency (Art of Emergency) becomes relevant in the context of the new definition of a Museum, proposed and approved by ICOM 2022, where community participation takes on a special role. Therefore, the experiences of the Inclusive Way Museum offer valuable insights into how museums can promote DEI, foster civic engagement, and support community development.
Amerindian or First Peoples?: Ethical Museum Cataloging Practice for the National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Raven Begell Long
Built within a context of overlapping colonial rule from the Spanish, French, and British, the National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago (NMAG) acts as a steward for collections that reflect the astounding hybridity of the twin island nation. Predominately representing the country’s African, American, Southeast Asian, and Asian diaspora, the region’s First People’s history too often is represented through the “vanishing Indian” narrative. As a part of an initiative to introduce a collection information system for the museum while serving as an intern in the Summer of 2022, and in conversation with local Indigenous leadership, I facilitated the shift from the term “Amerindian collection” to the “First People’s collection.” Through this change, NMAG corrected nomenclature that previously defined Indigenous presence through an outsider lens that paid homage to a European explorer and a misnomer by those who “discovered” the Western hemisphere. While the preferred term by local groups, this process required confronting the standardization of inclusive languages in museum cataloging, instead, opting for culture-sensitive strategies specific to local realities of heritage. These shifts necessitate ongoing conversations and relationship-building with the communities being represented. This presentation, based on my firsthand experience as a visiting professional and intern at both NMAG (2022) and at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of the American Indian (2023), will contribute to the ongoing discourse in museum cataloging to create respectful and empathetic collections processes for Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups by keeping in mind their respective colonial contexts.
