The structural racism, classism and patriarchy that are deeply and historically compatible with most American institutions, not surprisingly, have found a comfortable ‘home’ in the framework (and creation) of museums. I am intrigued (and distraught) with the ways in which museums nurture unjust, divisive systems and normalize them in the form of deceivingly objective elements, such as: professional networks, collecting practices, curatorial process, education and public programming, heritage preservation, and audience engagement.

That said, the historical movement of museums towards civic discourse along with an increased focus on public engagement present a stronger possibility for interventions. A historical look at both successful and unsuccessful attempts can help to frame the range of possibilities currently available to us and to imagine new ones. Similarly to many of my working group colleagues, I am particularly interested in the ways in which civic discourse in museums has and can facilitate social change. However, my cynical side is suspicious of popular concepts and practices emerging in museums, such as “dialogue,” “safe spaces,” “shared authority” and “tolerance” that offer impressions of harmony and egalitarianism, only to mask robust social and racial hierarchies. How can museums and civic discourse help to break through these pervasive and oppressive systems?

I come to museums as an anthropologist and public historian. I teach courses on arts and civic engagement, race and ethnic studies, museums and social justice, contested heritage, and the history of ethnographic and collecting practices. Additionally, I work with nationally significant historic house museums in urban centers, helping to re-envision them as sites of activism. These sites represent non-elite histories that have been neglected, denigrated and re-interpreted in connection to contemporary social justice issues. For this reason, some call them “non-traditional” museums. I am very interested in how we center so-called marginalized histories and engage history in museums to support self-representation and self-determination.

I worked with Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn for ten years. The site interprets a free black, intentional, land-owning community, which established its own schools, churches, and anti-slavery organizations, and operated as a safe space for New Yorkers of African descent in the greater New York area throughout the nineteenth century. The museum began as a result of more than a generation of community activism begun in the late 1960s to reclaim a forgotten history and restore three remaining structures. Before community residents fought to save these houses and defend this history, little was, yet, known about this significant community. In addition to restoring the historic houses, we engaged the public in this history, as a way to re-define ideas about the meaning of freedom and emancipation in a contemporary context and in self-determined ways. We explored interpretations that highlighted agency, independence, and activism and that resonated with present-day concerns, such as food justice, health disparities, women’s rights, and access to affordable housing. Similarly to the Lower East Side Museum in New York, Weeksville provided community-building and immersive experiences rooted in self-representation.

I currently work with the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. The Museum serves as a memorial to social reformer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jane Addams (1860-1935) and other resident social reformers whose work influenced the lives of their immigrant neighbors as well as national and international public policy. In 1889 she founded Hull-House with her colleague, Ellen Gates Starr, on the west side of Chicago working with immigrants who were struggling with poverty, racism, gender oppression and unregulated labor. Addams and the residents of Hull-House fought for women’s right to vote, advocated for better housing, fair labor practices, full citizenship rights for immigrants, public health, public education, recreational and public space, public arts, and free speech, and engaged with just about every major social issue at the time on a local, national and global level. Today the museum carries on this focus of social justice in all of our exhibitions, programs, and research and education initiatives.

We work with over a 100 community partners, many of whom are locally and nationally-active community organizers, including labor, food justice, Black Lives Matter and gender justice activists. I am interested in the ways in which a museum can best catalyze, support, and deepen the tremendous organizing, action, discussion, and debate happening around present-day fights for justice and equity. What roles have and can museums play in social movements? How can the history of social movements inform present day efforts? What are the limits or obstacles for museums as social change agents? In thinking about how the original Hull-House settlement addressed the “common good,” how have/do/can museums interpret their work for the “common good?” How do museums define or re-define “the public?”

Working consistently with feminist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal museums, which represent histories of working, poor, disenfranchised communities, and communities of color, I find myself repeatedly placed in a category of “radical museology” and asked to speak and write about it. But is this radical? Is it radical to center non-elite histories and to promote inclusion in museums? What makes the work that people like myself do “radical?” How can we situate “radical museology” in the long history of the movement by museums towards more inclusion, civic discourse and public engagement? Also, considering the strong attachment to museum conventions and the organization of power relationships these represent, is a “radical museology” possible? Invoking one of our working group questions, “how possible is it for museums to disrupt their own authoritative positions?”

~ Jennifer Scott, Director, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

Discussion

3 comments
  1. Laura B Schiavo says:

    I very much appreciate the model you describe here by Jennifer, and that I have long admired, of partnerships at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. Perhaps this is the beginning of an answer to Porchia’s questions about even the possibility of the museum as we know it to do the work we want it to do — including civic engagement and inching toward social justice. Where the history and much of the present of the museum as an institution is deeply embedded in structures of hierarchy, etc., there are other organizations that can work collaboratively with the museum along other paths. “Unfinished Business” at the JAH-HM is a great example of this.

  2. Lyra Monteiro says:

    I’m so glad to have learned about Hull-House this past year, and look forward to hearing more about what your partnerships with activists look like, and how this has impacted the demographics of your audience. I do think that the work you do is radical–and that this is why it is so rare to see within the context of museums, which are so entrenched in structures of power.

    1. Jennifer Scott says:

      Thank you Lyra! It was so good to meet you in person and hear and read all of the exciting work you are also doing with Museums On Site and the International Conference on the Inclusive Museum. I’d love to talk with you more about these initiatives and about the idea of creating new social and cultural forms and what that could mean. I think that we both have a lot of overlap, especially with thinking about place-based museum-style projects! I look forward to talking and conspiring more!

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