Growing interest in the entwined work of civic discourse and social justice—among museum professionals, public historians, funding organizations, and others—has brought with it the need to consider best practices, education and training, mechanisms for knowledge sharing, and other support considerations. I argue that it also brings the need for richer historical knowledge of museums’ work in this area.

To read U.S. museum history through its primary sources is, in part, to read about a field in a seemingly perpetual state of response to local and national crises over the long 20th century. On the bright side, a line of passionate professionals in different historical contexts have worked to make museums more useful, relevant, responsible, and, thereby sustainable, each in their own way and historical context. The dimmer view is to note patterns of immediacy and reinvention which suggest that practice is often separated from a deeper historical knowledge of itself. From my perspective as an Americanist and cultural historian who studies, has worked in, and collaborates with museums, we have a valuable resource at our disposal. But it is one that remains underutilized, both in general and in relation to museums’ civic discourse work.

In contemplating why this might be, two thoughts spring to mind. Time to mine the lessons of past decades is in short supply given the day-to-day demands of public-facing work in the nonprofit sector. Also, much of the history related to museums’ civic discourse work is not yet written or accessible in ways that make it immediately usable. This last point is more particularly true, I think, for history-focused museums. The literature on art museums’ work in this area is richer in case studies and reports thanks in no small part to foundation-sponsored research. That said, these materials, too, are ripe for analysis and contextualization.

So, with regard to our Museums and Civic Discourse working group and project, my interest is in finding ways to bring this past into productive dialogue with our work in the present. My primary thoughts on how to go about this are already reflected in the collaborative working group documents forged with co-leaders Jennifer Scott, Elena Gonzales, Nicole Ivy, and Robin Grenier.

A first step in helping to make past as well as current sources, tools, and scholarship discoverable is the development of a literature survey using Zotero, an open-source reference-management tool. At present this nascent resource is a scattered collection of items added in pursuit of my own research on this broad topic. Crowd-sourced contributions of citations and annotations will hasten its growth into a thing of value. So, please, join the effort! A metadata schema for tagging is also essential and, although the need was recognized early on, it is not my area of competency. So, I was more than grateful in December when Aletheia Wittman and Rose Paquet Kinsley of The Incluseum shared the work undertaken with Gabbie Barnes and Becca Fronczak to develop a controlled tagging vocabulary for the blog (to which our working group colleague Porchia Moore is also a frequent contributor). The serendipitous boon for this project underscores the value to the field of collegial resource sharing. Soon, thanks to a University of Connecticut SHARE award, undergraduate researcher Samantha Mairson will be bringing her information sciences skills to the task of getting the Museums and Civic Discourse group library in order.

Another issue central to this project, as noted in our group statement, is that museums as public agents have often been tensed between oligarchic and democratic imperatives. Lately, for another project, I have been thinking about the influence of discipline-specific mental models on the nature of collaborative work in the digital humanities. Mental models, to paraphrase work by Grenier and Dana Dudzinska-Przesmitzki, guide our perceptions of the physical and social dimensions of the world around us and inform values, decision-making, and behaviors. The many mental maps an individual possesses are each one, as the authors observe, “a collection of past perceptions garnered from many experiences over time that are linked together by a common theme or feature.”

Perhaps it is too great of a leap to say that a common theme of our field is the question: Who—and what—are museums for? And from there to jump to the gallery of mental models that 20th- and 21st-century museum practitioners and pundits have shared in answer to those questions. Their writings invoke, as conceptual representations, the temple, department store, laboratory, mausoleum, social instrument, book, arsenal of knowledge, forum, contact zone, third space, and soup kitchen, to name just a few. (The last is Elaine Heumann Gurian’s provocation from her 2010 meditation on museums’ prospects as community-centered sites for social services.) Each of these imperfect analogues crystallizes a purposive answer to the “what for” of museums. Each also suggests a set of philosophies, values, and practices that help produce the conditions which have welcomed and engaged some among the human “who” but have also disinterested and excluded others. In large part, and until recently, the mental models most widely shared and circulated have been put to page by white males in positions of power within institutional hierarchies. Clearly, that is an issue to address.

Mental models are useful, memorable ways to distill ideas about the complex and by no means monolithic institutional form that we call the museum. But, as others have argued, casting them as tidily oppositional or mutually exclusive states of museum being obscures the degree to which various of these mental maps have occupied the same spaces at the same time. (And, as noted, overshadow the mental models possessed by other staff and volunteers as well as different publics.) In balancing accountability to private and public stakeholders more museums struck blended positions in relation to the available paradigms (and still do) than scholarship often allows. And more than some in a given time or museum have wished to allow. So, instead of the gallery metaphor that I suggested before, which implies each model be displayed and regarded as a distinct specimen, perhaps the better analogy is to imagine these as mental maps on overhead transparencies (so old-school, I know) that have been, in different configurations, overlaid, (mis)aligned, reshuffled, added to, and redrawn.

At different points in our national history this process has become more noticeably fraught and, in the long term, productive. In the 1920s and ‘30s, for example, museums grappled with how they might shed their reputation as clubs for the initiated and re-envision themselves as social instruments dedicated to deepening their communities’ preparedness to engage with pressing public issues. (Lest this sound too rosy, this is also a period in which museums debated whether to even count a geography’s “negro population” when calculating what percentage of the community’s total citizenry an institution served.) Some changes took root, gradually transforming common practice, while other innovations faded with the advent of World War II.

Later decades focused on the tensions between the temple and the forum, the latter envisioned by some as a more democratic, inclusive model for “confrontation, experimentation and debate.” In rereading that quote in Duncan F. Cameron’s 1971 “The Museum: A Temple or the Forum,” I was struck by what I had forgotten about his arguments. He did call for museums to become more socially responsible; he did see the need for the forum. But, in reforming, museums were not to become forums, not if they wished to remain “bona fide.”

The turn of the 21st century brought the American Alliance of Museums’ Mastering
Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums
and a companion toolkit. These offered
guidelines for advancing museums’ roles in civic dialogue, yet noted that “while museums are viewed as trusted and respected institutions, many community members also see them as elitist and aloof.” In 2007, Museums & Social Issues devoted an entire issue to the topic of civic discourse.

Contemporary models for such work, particularly in the area of conversation-centered programs, have become more plentiful. (Although the development of metrics for evaluating their impact has lagged). Institutions, such as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and those belonging to the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, have advanced frameworks for museums aspiring to serve as discussions sites where urgent, even contentious, local and national public issues can be explored in productive ways. Here in Connecticut, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center has facilitated its “Salons at Stowe,” since 2008. These “21st-century parlor conversations” are clearly connected to the site’s history and collections as well as firmly rooted in the institution’s mission statement. In 2014, the Institute for Museum and Library Services funded “Let’s Talk: A Meta-Conversation about Dialogue.” This research project led by Kris Morrissey has convened university educators and colleagues in STEM and history-based institutions to “analyze and synthesize what is known about dialogue programs” in order to advance the field’s understanding and capacity in this area of practice.

Civic discourse, understood as collaborative meaning-making that can open pathways to understanding, action, and change, encompasses other forms of encounter, too. I am eager to learn more from my colleagues John Bell and Emily Wicks of UConn’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry about their use of toy theater workshops to engage youth in headline issues with complex histories. For example, a collaboration with the UConn Law School and Hartford High School students, called “Puppetry and the Law,” guided students in the creation of shows about contemporary legal and social issues, including racial profiling. This form of verbal, tactile, and physical exchange not only involves the participants in grappling with different mental models surrounding the issues they explore, it invites them to overlay, (mis)align, reshuffle, add to, and redraw new ones. And that’s part of what I hope we do in our work together online, in Baltimore, and going forward.

~ Clarissa Ceglio, University of Connecticut

Discussion

2 comments
  1. Christine Arato says:

    Puppets! Yes, puppets! I think our current cultural predicament calls for modes of ritualized inquiry that engage, unnerve, challenge and inspire. Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre hooked me many years ago, mostly because these inclusive modes of performative discourse could occupy almost any public space. Do you think that museum spaces are essential to these kinds of discourse? I’m thinking about Lyra’s site-specific experiments and the possibility of transforming “everyday spaces” as a way of normalizing (or at least mental mapping) this kind of playful and deeply critical reshuffling.

  2. Lyra Monteiro says:

    Thanks so much for this overview of the history of museums and civic discourse, Clarissa. I absolutely love the overhead transparencies metaphor–nothing else is really like them!

    The title of one of the dialogue based programs that you mention, the “Salons at Stowe,” reminds me of one of the challenges that I see this kind of programming facing: what’s up with the exclusive, elitist name? I thought this about the Providence Athenaeum’s Salon series, as well. You have to have a certain level of cultural knowledge to even understand what is being referred to…which seems to me to defeat the purpose of creating inclusive spaces.

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