Future of Museums

The Powerful (and Power-Shifting) Potential of Museum Participation

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For over a century, museums have claimed that they will democratize. However, a range of issues and institutional cultures that privilege expertise have ensured that professional practice remains one-sided. When visitors engaged in “imagined conversations” with future and past visitors, decision-makers, and communities, they exposed the powerful (and power-shifting) potential of museum participation. Explore the unexpected and at times uncomfortable results, developing new understandings and testing emerging thinking in the field.

Learning Objectives:

• Upon completion, participants will have gained new knowledge about the impact of Nina Simon’s advocacy for participatory experiences, drawing on one of the first opportunities to examine museum participation in an Australian context based on three new bodies of data.
• Differentiate between the limitations of traditional museum practices and the potential benefits of participatory culture.
• Upon completion, participants will articulate new, original findings in museum studies: visitors engage in ‘imagined conversations’ with future and past visitors, decision-makers and power holders (dead or alive), and with communities to whom they may not otherwise have access, when they engage with participatory approaches in a museum environment.

Presenter(s)

• 

  Rachael Coghlan, PhD

  PhD, Chief Executive Officer/Artistic Director of Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre and the Artistic Director of DESIGN Canberra festival
  Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre and DESIGN Canberra festival