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The term "othering" refers to a persistent Us and Them dynamic between museums and their participating public. To reframe this historically paternalistic subject-positioning, over the last decade or so many museums have made firm attempts to address this by attempting to move from being "providers" of engagements to facilitating access to cultural right by embedding co-curatorial techniques and participation. Through the analysis of three co-curated participatory case studies, this book examines how power performs in co-curatorial museum practice. It discusses how it is not just how the participatory process is enacted that is necessary to create this shift to a more socially just profile, but systemic pressures of vulnerability and responsibility found in the political economy of the museum and its participants. This book will chart how this dynamic performs in museums when working with different groups of people, such as volunteers, community participants, and professional artists, presented with differing levels of co-curatorial decision making. The book further investigates whether performances of power are relational to who the participants are, how the processes of participation are constructed, and where the participation takes place, what language is used when conducting these relationships and what the funded institutional responsibilities do to the co-curators (the community and museum staff) when traditional co-curation and co-curation in transition to non-selective curation is applied. Grounding this discussion is the development of this test method of non-selective curation which further illuminates some of these challenges and aims to successfully mitigate them through a radically open and inclusive approach to co-curation.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction: setting out the parameters.- Chapter 2. Why is this book called The Othering Museum?.- Chapter 3. Addressing cognitive dissonance in museums.- Chapter 4. The Activist Museum (Janes and Sandell, 2019) a new 'identity' through language?.- Chapter 5. Truth, Power, Participation and Discourse.- Chapter 6. Power and identity.- Chapter 7. Bordieuan [dis]positions: locations of responsibility.- Chapter 8. From Language to languaging: from site of power to sites of openness.- Chapter 9. A profound edge' (hooks, 1989): Theatre as participatory activism.- Chapter 10. Transitioning participant fear: oppressions and symbolic power.- Transitions from Selective Curation to Non - Selective.- Chapter 11. CurioUS and The Intercultural Project.- Chapter 12. Bricks and Mortar.- Chapter 13. The frontstage power of non-selective curation.- Chapter 14. Museums Made Dark.- Chapter 15. Findings from the development phase of NSC: Two 'back stages', how power performs on different pages by skirting the margins.- Chapter 16. Conclusion: Transitioning from selective to non-selective implementations for NSC.- CHAPTER 17. The development of NSC.
About the author
Dr Carrie Westwater is a Lecturer (Teaching & Research) in the field of Creative and Cultural Industries at Cardiff University, UK. Her research has a special focus on Human and Cultural Rights, spatial and social justice and participatory arts. She is most interested in theatre and film that either function as tools to address trauma and complex societal issues, or represents them.
