Museums and Communities - Week 3

AAM Museums and Community Resolution

• "The American Association of Museums urges all museums to embrace their responsibility to be active and collaborative civic institutions and to respond to the aspirations and needs of citizens in their communities."
• museums as cultural symbols, contributors to community enterprise, stewards of collections, providers of educational experiences, transformers of world views
• "encourage people to... recognize truths that unify all generations and define our common humanity"
• if this is true, this is one way that museums can help develop community ties and create social bonds
• new role for museums in community, which AAM aims to support
• collaborate with community for the community's benefit
• increase museum's participation in community life and vice versa
• "requires sharing creativity, vision, responsibility, and resources"
• achieve diversity within museum to reflect diversity in community

AAM Cultivating Community Connections

• constituents are demanding that museums play a bigger role within their communities
• time of building social capital and social networks: find ways to bring people together
• Museums and Community Initiative: support museums who may not currently have the organizational capacity to build community partnerships
• need adequate time and money, a strong leadership commitment, an organizational culture that embraces change, and staff skilled at listening to community voices and establishing community relationships
• “civic engagement”—individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern
• “social capital”—a set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit them to cooperate with one another
• civic role must be explored throughout the entire execution rather than one group of programmers
• collaborations with non-cultural institutions can be helpful
• partnerships can generate a sense of pride and ownership among participants
• core values: accessibility and inclusiveness
• possibility to form new, broader definitions of community than the immediate surrounding
• diversity within the museum can be helpful
• strong community partnerships are based on trust and reciprocity--more than just the museum's agenda; need for an ongoing dialogue
• first museums must ensure that their processes, decision-making, and actions are open, available, and understandable to the public
• hire people trained in dealing with communities, such as social service workers

Companion to Museum Studies: Elizabeth Crooke's "Museums and Communities"

• link between museum studies and community studies: concern for identity, representation, people, and social responsibility in the museum tied to community concerns about a greater appreciation of the formation of identity, the creation of relationships, and definitions of belonging
• with some social programs, "community" acts as a bonus word; the programs don't actually make the community a fundamental part of the implementation of the program/policy (171)
• no single definition of community, especially within the museum
• can be defined by a variety of characteristics in terms of what their connections are based on, how "thick" those connections are, the purpose/attitude of the community, etc.
• a community is more than some amalgamation of people with similar interests or tied to a similar location: "It is not enough to have the characteristics of community; rather, it is essential to have the motivation to bring these into a self-forming unit." (173)
• communities have a role in generating collective identity and generating senses of belonging (174)
• The District Six Museum, Cape Town
• place that memorializes history of the struggle of those who were expelled from this area 
• different from a mainstream museum, reflecting its special focus
• example of community taking their heritage into their own hands and expressing it through a museum as a place able to help build community
• Community museum networks, Mexico
• "bottom up community museum networking process"
• development of new community museums meant to impact positively "the mobilization of social capital, empowerment of the rural poor, enhancement of local government, the creation of durable partnerships between the state and civil society, and the creation of local defenses against the homogenizing forces of cultural globalization" (176)
• focus on building collective ownership, self-esteem, knowledge and pride in cultural origins, and the creation of cultural identity
• aim to forge community by improving the economic potential of the area
• Community exhibitions in Northern Ireland 
• "short-lived local history exhibitions curated by community organizations" (176)
• "identity projects"
• exercise in community autobiography, accomplished collectively
• exhibition seen not as the end, but as an important part of the process of the creation of community identity
• the use of the word "community" can become exclusive if people feel as if they are not a part of the community the exhibition is targeting
• strength in being led by community members, but the exhibitions could have a slant for that reason (risking nostalgia, over-simplicity, or unintended exclusivity)
• culture as a means to build social capital (180)
• engagement with the idea of "community" is forcing museums to rethink the identity, role, and social worth of the museum space (183)
• democratizing history and the museum space connected to idea of increasing community participation

Companion to Museum Studies: Gordon Fyfe's "Sociology and the Social Aspects of Museums"

• details historical relationship of sociology and museums to industrialization, political revolution, and the formation of nation-states
• commitment to reason and rationality
• concern "with understanding and ordering a world thought to be disordered by industrial and political revolutions" (34)
• does this hold with the facts presented in the other readings this week?
• new ways about thinking of museum space (35)
• heterotopic space (place outside of all other places within which other places and times were "represented, contested, and reversed")
• characteristically Western, universalizing, heteratopia that aspired to contain all times, ages, forms, and tastes in one space
• museum has the ability to transfigure societies as communities and nations
• diverse research methods were developed to deal with museum studies
• museum research may be skewed as most research has been conducted in/concering art museums
• Adorno: saw museums as places that "neutralized culture" and destroyed 'the pleasure of looking' (37)
• barriers to certain class's participation in the museum: exclusivity, creation of a sense of inferiority
• concern for diversity of museum personnel, not just the diversity of the museum visitors
• role of heritage and the heritage industry in 20th century (40)
• the implicit power of collections: problems of ownership, collecting as a form of "symbolic domination" (43)
• collection became "centers of calculation and permitted people to see new things" (45)

Companion to Museum Studies: George E. Hein's Museum Education

• constant tension between curatorial role and educational role of museum
• museums are considered educational institutions
• museums have a "social responsibility" to provide education
• "a constructivist or progressive educational mission necessarily puts an emphasis on social change" (349)
• importance of education to progressive educators: "faith in democracy and in the efficacy of education to produce a more democratic society" (349) 
• 4 implications of Dewey's belief for museums (349-350)
• questioning of dualisms
• goal of education is further education
• challenge visitors and themselves
• connect educational work back to live
• collections within the context of a public museum should take on an educational role
• two periods of museum education reform:
• mid-19th century - pre WWI: focus on illustrating national/imperial strength, investigating scientific problems, and somewhat education
• post WWI: explosion of museum education, focus on nationalist political themes and exhibiting new conceptions of art and science
• previously there had been no formal education staff at museums
• educational workforce of museum became primarily female, following typical gender divisions in society (344)
• three museum "philosophies"
• educational museum
• aesthetic museum
• social museum
• concept that museums were education resources for adults while schools were meant to educate children
• Gilman: focus on helping the "Sunday visitor" to understand the collections (343)
• problem: how to deal with the "passive" learning at museums
• problem: how to measure the learning that takes place at museums
• museums have unfavorable conditions for school-like learning and assessment (ex. graded tests)
• coincides with redefinition of education as a "meaningful experience" rather than a "defined content outcome" (348)
• new strategies have been created to engage visitors (have them make their own labels, ask them provocative questions instead of giving them answers, etc.)

Companion to Museum Studies: Jeffrey Abt's "The Origins of the Public Museum"

• traces history of public museum back through the Louvre and the Ashmolean Museum (usually considered the first public museums) back to Aristotle's Lyceum and its mouseion
• discusses political implications of these early forms of museums
• ex: Greek statuary displayed in Rome's public arena communicated state's power and reach to res publica but also foreigners (118)
• role of stewardship and ownership tied to these places
• "public" and "private" could overlap in libraries in Rome (c. 30-20 BCE)
• Renaissance: beginnings of collections
• "musaeum" applied to "characterize these collections, their settings, and the encyclopedic ambitions of their creators, and the kinds of objects collected" (120)
• presentation of artifacts moved to "less approachable" places/locations: from outdoors to indoors (121)
• Ashmolean: intended as public museum
• it and other museums slowly began to accomodate more visitors form varying background and classes
• some saw these non-elite audiences as a problem which hurt the mission/value of the museums
• most museums up to the mid 19th century were led "by private citizens pursuing commonly shared goals in concert," not government (130)
• late 19th century: focus primarily on creating art museums; also, museums became more professionalized
• American museums were considered to be a "public trust"; mentions the attention to "local constituencies" is founded on legal reasoning

Questions/Comments

• the idea that museums help people to define a common humanity is interesting when considering how museums might help to bridge gaps in communities and promote dialogue and engagement (and decrease discrimination/alienation) among different groups
• What are ways to decrease the diversity within the museum?  How does this relate to the different ideas of representation (descriptive/substantive)?
• many articles mention this need to diversity university personell
• there's also the gender connection of women being predominantly involved in the education departments of museums
• Are there examples of museums who have formed institution-wide committees to oversee their community involvement
• In what ways can a community be defined?  Is there a limit to what can constitute a community?
• How are the community museum networks in Mexico connected to developments in the government/state?  Also, what is the relationship the article suggests between their desire to increase the economic potential of these areas and forge community?  How can one lead to the other?
• How does the District Six Museum attract/involve those that weren't expelled, particularly those that still live there?
• How can "community" be used in an inclusive way, if it can?
• Hein described three different museum "philosophies."  Is it possible for a museum to adequately fulfill more than one of those philosophies?
• There's a large focus, especially in "The Public," about the tension between museum educators and curators concerning how the art should be presented and for whom it should be presented.
• strides have been made to contextualize art for lower-class visitors to help them gain some meaning from the art itself
• different waves of how public has been received at museum
• a number of curators think that education is a degradation to the art of the museum's collection, consider it a "distraction"
• trend away from public programming and toward connoisseurship within professional museum education programs 
• disagreement about the purpose of education: is it to attract the masses or just increase the elite museums already cater to
• **questions why we care if everyone goes to museums, as compared to sporting events or other cultural venues
• is this true?
• Is the solution to having a museum that caters to everyone just having multiple museums?  How are the divisions between these museums constructed?  Are these divisions more problematic than they are helpful?  Can a balance be achieved?

Further Reading

Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums (AAM)

A Museums and Community Toolkit (AAM)
AAM (1995) Museums in the Life of a City: Strategies for Community Partnerships. Washington: American Association of Museums.
Adam, TR. The Civic Value of Museums (New York: American ASsociation for Adult Education, 1957). 
Boylan, P.J. (1995) Heritage and cultural policy: the role of museums (www.city.ac.uk)
Delanty, G. (2003) Community. London, Routledge.
DiMaggio, P. and Useem, P. (1978) Cultural policy and public policy. Social Research, 45 (2): 356-89.
DiMaggio and Useem, P. (1978) Social class and arts consumption. Theory and Society, 5: 141-61.
von Lehn, D. and Heath, C. (n.d.) Studying "visitor behavior" in museums and galleries (www-sv.eiet.fr)
Jevons, William Stanley, "The Use and Abuse of Museums," in Methods of Social Reform (London: Macmillan, 1883).
Low, Theodore L. The Museum as Social Instrument (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1942).
Zolberg, V. (1981) Conflicting Visions in American art museums. Theory and Society, 10: 81-102.
Zolberg, V. (1994) "An elite experience for everyone": art museums, the public and cultural literacy.  In D.J. Sherman and I. Rogoff (eds), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourse, Spectacles, pp. 49-65.  London: Routledge.