Story, Voice, and Polyvocality: Understanding Intersectionality through Qualitative Research Design in Art & Cultural Museums

Colloquium
Deborah Randolph,  Pat Villeneuve,  Ann Rowson Love,  Jennifer Drinkwater,  Alice Anderson  

Fostering inclusion and intersectionality requires nuanced strategies beyond scales, measurements, and questionnaires. This colloquium focuses on how museum experiences and intersectionality can be understood through qualitative social research initiatives. It introduces a new resource, An Introductory Guide to Qualitative Research in Art Museums (Love & Randolph, 2024), which offers examples of current practices and findings from an embedded study based on interviews with international museum researchers—activating organizational learning, empowering polyvocality, acknowledging diverse ways of knowing, recognizing time and timeliness, and engaging audiences through their museum experiences. Researcher and artist contributors to this book present the following papers. Ann Rowson Love’s, “Finding Your Wings: Philosophical Orientations and Positioning a Worldview,” offers a frame for thinking through philosophical alignment. Deborah Randolph’s, “Museums and Ways of Knowing: Catalysts for Inclusion,” focuses on ways of knowing, a theme from the embedded study, and its insight into understanding intersectionality in art museums. Jennifer Drinkwater, who explores cultural histories through painting and embroidery, shares her methods and research experiences in her paper, “Art as Field Work.” Pat Villeneuve’s, “Developing Theory in Qualitative Research” is based on her work with theory and development of the dimensions in curation model (Villeneuve & Love, 2023). Alice Anderson’s “Feeling Seen, Connected and Challenged: Developing New Methods to Measure Visitors' Identity Affirming Experiences in Arts and Culture Museums” explores a museum visitor engagement model that includes how visitors’ identities influence the relationship they have with or to museums and the vulnerability that visitors bring to their museum experiences.