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"Inclusion” is a word, a concept, a value, a set of practices, but what should it mean for museum staff and leaders as they envision new ways of being a museum in an emergent future? Political and environmental upheavals, and now a global pandemic, are transforming the museum landscape forever. How can our paradigm for understanding inclusion continue to transform as well? This book offers a new paradigm for understanding inclusion grounded in a retrospective of museum worker efforts to test the limits of inclusion, a reflection on inclusion’s advantages and limitations in practice, as well as the integral concerns of racial equity and social justice. Questions throughout the book invite readers to reflect on how their own experiences can add to, and expand on, new ways of thinking about inclusion in museums. Museum workers and lovers can use this book as a tool for engaging with “inclusion” anew, and as a terrain for collaborative inquiry and world-building that can help us imagine and realize new potential for museums in the future.
Do museums need to be inclusive? How do we define inclusion? Understanding and Implementing Inclusion in Museums is the pioneer text to focus solely on the notion of inclusion for museums. This book is intended to demystify the much-debated idea of inclusion for museum professionals, theorists, professors, and researchers. The chapters within this book are intended to function as a guide for understanding, implementing, and evaluating inclusion in your museum. This insightful examination ofinclusion in museums features: An introductory definition of inclusion for museums. Guidelines for creating inclusion in your museum through partnerships with people and community organizations. Strategies for driving social change through inclusive museum practice. Tools for implementing inclusion in your museum. Mechanisms for evaluating the inclusiveness of your museum. An encyclopedic Who’s Who of museum professionals serving as advocates, agents, and architects of inclusion today. An extensive resource list to aid you and your museum. We have never had a book solely about inclusion for museums, and never with such a strong focus on American institutions. I invite you to join the conversation concerning inclusion armed with greater understanding and the tools to implement change through your museum.
Museums everywhere have the potential to serve as agents of change—bringing people together, contributing to local communities, and changing people’s lives. So how can we, as individuals, radically expand the work of museums to live up to this potential? How can we more fiercely recognize the meaningful work that museums are doing to enact change around the relevant issues in our communities? How can we work together to build a stronger culture of equity and care within museums ? Questions like these are increasingly vital for all museum professionals to consider, no matter what your role is within your institution. They are also important questions for all of us to be thinking about more deeply as citizens and community members. This book is about the work we need to do to become changemakers and demand that that our museums take action toward positive social change and bring people together into a more just, equitable, compassionate, and connected society. It is a journey toward tapping the energies within all of us to make change happen and proactively shape a new future.
This book proposes that the Incluseum's paradigm can help the field meet the challenges of this current landscape and offer practical guidance for museum workers, leaders and emerging professionals doing the daily work to transform the future of museums.
The museum field is experiencing a critical gaze that is both “of the moment” and long overdue. Museums were built as colonial enterprises and are slow to awaken to the harm caused by their actions which are not limited to the capturing and keeping of Indigenous ancestors, the exclusion and erasure of Black voices, bodies, and creativity, and the positioning of white power in the C-suite and board rooms. For decades, the conversation about equity and inclusion in the museum field has become louder. It is no longer possible to ignore the systemic racism embedded in our society and our profession. The Inclusive Museum Leader offers insights and perspectives from two recognized museums leaders who have joined together to offer practical solutions and opportunities for today’s museum leaders. Authors share their journeys to becoming inclusive leaders, as well as decisions they have made and actions they have taken to build equitable practices within their organizations. Throughout the book are personal exercises and provocations the reader is invited to respond to, making the book a valuable tool for any museum leader looking to enhance their style and re-frame their decision-making process.
Diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion in all aspects of museums’ structure and programming are top issues in the field today – and in the overall arts/culture sector. Much has been written, from various perspectives, over several decades. Yet, a lack of diversity remains and exclusive practices and inequities persist in all types of museums. A go-to resource for readers interested in learning about diversity and inclusion work in the field – past, present and future. This edited collection of the most important essays, speeches, and reports on these topics seeks to facilitate a much-needed intergenerational dialogue that builds on lessons from the past, broadens thinking about the many different facets of this complex work, and ignites inspiration for continuing to correct inequities across museums of all types, sizes, and locations. In this book compiled and edited by Dr. Johnnetta Betch Cole, who has served as both director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and as the president of both historically Black colleges for women in the United States, Spelman College and Bennett College (a distinction she alone holds) and Laura Lott, president and CEO of the American Alliance of Museums, (the first woman to the lead the organization), thought leaders in the museum field present their research, analysis and work to answer some of the most challenge questions facing the museum field. Why do these problems persist? How can a new generation of museum leaders champion change to better represent the communities that museums strive to serve and engage? What can we learn from those who have been observing, experiencing, and writing about these issues?
A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change. As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence. In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.
In the U.S., museums have long struggled with elitism and exclusion. Recently, however, the notion of inclusion has become a central and defining aspect of contemporary U.S. museological practice and thought. In 2018-2019 alone, a number of institutional and grassroots initiatives made strides towards centering inclusion in the U.S. museum field. For example, institutionally, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) announced a 3-year grant initiative aimed to “provide the framework, training, and resources for museum leaders to build inclusive cultures within their institutions that more accurately reflect the communities they serve” (American Alliance of Museums, Jan. 15, 2019). At the same time, individual and grassroots efforts are many and varied. For example, museum leader, and public intellectual, Nina Simon announced her new initiative called of/by/for/all that will act as an “accelerator for change within the broader movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion in community-based organizations” (of/by/for/all, n.d.). While significant, these and other efforts remain disparate and, among them, present few explicit connections. Two interlinked objectives motivated this dissertation. The first was conceptual, and the second empirical. On the conceptual-level, I first discussed various dimensions of inclusion in museums in order to probe the question: How can systemic change centered on inclusion be brought about? I focused my discussion on the significance of inclusion to the museum field, its history, and who has been involved in conversations about it. In particular, I highlighted how authors such as Taylor (2017) and Taylor and Kegan (2017) put forth a whole system approach to inclusion in museums. Next, building on this approach, I developed a framework entitled Four Interacting Levels of System Change for Cultivating Inclusion. This framework is made of actionable strategies synthesized from contemporary sources on inclusion in U.S. museums discussed in the literature. To move the field forward, this framework can be adopted and adapted in practice. Next, on the empirical-level, I conducted a single, instrumental case study of The Incluseum, a project that I co-founded in 2012. Since then, it has become the longest run multivocal platform dedicated to ongoing, collaborative inquiry about inclusion in museums. My guiding research question was: What insights does the content of The Incluseum provide into the state of practice pertaining to inclusion in U.S. museums? Four main themes emerged through an inductive thematic analysis of Incluseum blog entries: Relationships, Social Justice, Representation and Access, and Institutional Change. Each is comprised of sub-themes. These themes are deeply interconnected and best understood as being part of one-another, as constituting a whole, or relational matrix. In other words, inclusion is best understood as existing at the center of this relational matrix; it is about the local interplay of these four themes. Looking to the Four Interacting Levels of System Change for Cultivating Inclusion Framework and the findings of this study side-by-side, we see a high degree of overlap, but must be cautious of their different orientation. More specifically, both present a whole-systems view of museums, albeit from different angles. The Framework takes an instrumental and solution-oriented approach to systems change, while the study’s findings are descriptive of a landscape and emphasize a relational approach to change with no clear prescribed method. The study’s findings point to a paradigmatic change from ‘power-over’ to ‘power-with’, which speaks to an ontological approach to inclusion; one that is predicated on a different way of thinking – a relational way of thinking. As such, care-centered values emerge as key to inclusion-related work. Importantly, the instrumental approach presented in the framework and the relational approach deriving from this study might not be mutually exclusive, but need to be contextually negotiated in practice. Future research can inquire about this local and practice-based orientation to complement the more common benchmarking studies that national groups like the AAM undertake. While this dissertation and its conclusions certainly have no pretense to close the book on the question of inclusion in U.S. museums, they have attempted to draw attention to and hold high an on-going process of collaborative inquiry involving many. This inquiry, both through the literature and through the blogposts analyzed, represents a rich diversity of museum practitioners and scholars, all continuing to learn through reflection and action. The dissertation provides perspectives from many voices, both conceptual and empirically. Its findings expand and strengthen the museological knowledge base with both conceptual and practical significance (Tracy, 2013). And, in line with Tracy’s definition of a "significant contribution", it has served to "bring some clarity, make visible what is hidden or inappropriately ignored, and generate a sense of insight and deepened understanding" (ibid, p. 240).
Museums have been active in shaping knowledge over the last six hundred years. Yet what is their function within today's society? At the present time, when funding is becoming increasingly scarce, difficult questions are being asked about the justification of museums. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge presents a critical survey of major changes in current assumptions about the nature of museums. Through the examination of case studies, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill reveals a variety of different roles for museums in the production and shaping of knowledge. Today, museums are once again organising their spaces and collections to present themselves as environments for experimental and self-directed learning.
This book draws from the author's nearly three-decade career of being "the only one in the room". Cecile Shellman builds a process for individualizing, identifying, and prioritizing DEAI challenges; acknowledges key universal challenges in goal-setting and goal achieving; and shares resources and tools for making and charting progress.