This book examines the practice of community engagement in museums through the notion of care. It focuses on building an understanding of the logic of care that underpins this practice, with a view to outlining new roles for museums within community health and social care. This book engages with the recent growing focus on community participation in museum activities, notably in the area of health and wellbeing. It explores this theme through an analysis of the practices of community engagement workers at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums in the UK. It examines how this work is operationalised and valued in the museum, and the institutional barriers to this practice. It presents the practices of care that shape community-led exhibitions, and community engagement projects involving health and social care partners and their clients. Drawing on the ethics of care and geographies of care literatures, this text provides readers with novel perspectives for transforming the museum into a space of social care. This book will appeal to museum studies scholars and professionals, geographers, organisational studies scholars, as well as students interested in the social role of museums.

Crafting Museum Social Media for Social Inclusion Work investigates if and how social media can be integrated into the social inclusion initiatives of museums, and the contextual factors that impact this integration. Drawing on a year‐long case study of Glasgow Museums (Scotland), international mini case studies, and interviews with museum professionals, Kist reveals the complex social and technical negotiations that staff participate in to align social media practices with social inclusion work. Kist argues that the staff practices she observed around social media can be usefully understood through the idea of ‘craft’. This reframes staff practices for imagining future museum social media work as iterative, intuitive, and skilled balancing acts. As a craft, staff creatively draw on and work around social media affordances to balance the norms of their social inclusion work with the perceived interests and needs of users and community groups. Understanding the relation between museums’ use of social media and their ability to contribute to social inclusion initiatives is imperative, especially given the increasingly pervasive use of social media across the cultural heritage sector in recent years. Crafting Museum Social Media for Social Inclusion Work will be valuable for academics, practitioners, and students working in cultural heritage, museum studies, or social work.

Peter Sloterdijk sees our digitalized world in a "growing spatial crisis", accompanied by the danger of a "general virtuality of all relationships". Others view the digitalization of the world as opening up a grassroots democratic space that allows everyone access to culture. Against this backdrop, this anthology examines the spatial characteristics of the museum – between physical place and virtual space. The chapters collected here approach the museum space from various disciplinary perspectives, such as philosophy, history, art history, architecture, scenography, museum education and curatorial studies. At the same time, the contributions by international museum experts are assigned to different literary genres – fundamental considerations alternate with think pieces, case studies and interviews.

"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.

A re-evaluation of the UK's law on cultural heritage through the lens of the ethics of care.

Future Memory Work addresses a crucial challenge in contemporary pluralistic societies: the organisation of open, participatory and socially inclusive memory practices in digital media ecologies. It brings a novel relational approach to future memory work across institutions, people, and modalities. Advancing inter- and transdisciplinary research and rich empirical cases from across Europe and beyond, the book examines how memory practices in digital media are open for engagement of people with diverse backgrounds. It analyses the modalities of memory making and how they can enable institutional and public memory making with a broad spectrum of people and groups in civil society at local, translocal, national and global levels. The chapters examine the mediatized character of memory making, whilst also critically considering what obstacles and potentials emerge from participatory memory work. As a whole, the book is a comprehensive source of knowledge and ideas for creating socially inclusive, sustainable memory practices and futures. It sets the multidisciplinary research agenda for advancing studies of heritage in contemporary digital media as an element and a driver of cultural and social change. Future Memory Work is essential reading for academics, students and professionals working in the fields of Anthropology, Museum Studies, Digital Cultural Heritage, Memory Studies, Cultural Studies and Design.

Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation explores Indigenous practices of curation, object repatriation, and cross-cultural community engagement in a dynamic Koori museum. Grounded in the fact that Gunai Kurnai people have never ceded sovereignty, the text reorients dominant temporal and colonial approaches of museum studies to document and theorise Gunai Kurnai self-presentation and community engagement in the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place. Researched and co-authored by the Cultural Manager of the Keeping Place, Gunai Kurnai Monero Ngarigo man Robert Hudson, and white Historian Shannon Woodcock, the book traces the temporal, social, and cultural considerations of the Elders who curated the permanent exhibition in the early 1990s. Discussing community management of a collection growing through the ongoing repatriation of tools, art, and Ancestor remains, the text also explores how Robert Hudson engages with visitors to the Keeping Place and local colonial history museums, and theorises the power of Gunai Kurnai work with individuals and institutions in the small museum context. Finally, Hudson and Woodcock demonstrate that the Keeping Place articulates sophisticated Gunai Kurnai-grounded methodologies of museum practice in relation to international critical Indigenous studies scholarship. Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation provides a vital case study of an Indigenous museum space written from an inside perspective. As such, the book will be essential reading for scholars and students engaged in the study of museums and heritage, Indigenous peoples, decolonisation, race, anthropology, culture, and history.

This book Includes contributions from a wide range of scholar-practitioners working across the arts, humanities, sciences, education, business, and mental health disciplines. Uses abundance-thinking and takes a strengths-based appreciative approach to museum purpose, function and being. Demonstrates that, even within the most difficult climates, abundance-oriented methods and perspectives can inspire and elicit flourishing in visitors, staff and communities, thus positioning museums as places where people find meaningful and purposeful work and where visitors find satisfaction, meaning, inspiration, and motivation. Draws from the disciplines of positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship, contemplative studies, and museum studies, the book is unified and organized into six thematic areas that comprise the Flourishing Museum Framework: courage, transformation, care, optimism, gratitude, and delight. Will be essential reading for academics and students working in the museum and heritage fields, as well as the cognate disciplines of arts management and creative industries. It will also be useful to practitioners working in museums and heritage sites around the world.

Plural Heritages and Community Co-production is a landmark contribution on the nature and plurality of heritages and how they can be creatively and ethically presented in urban space. Providing an overview of the concept of plural heritages, this book explores the theory, politics, and practice of community co-production as they intersect with currents in critical heritage thinking, walking as ethnography, and digital design methods. Told through a central case study in Istanbul, Turkey, this volume aligns with cultural and political imperatives to consider the plural values, meanings, affects, and relativities of heritage sites for the multiple communities who live – or, as for diaspora and displaced groups, have lived – with them. It suggests a range of methods for locating and valorising alternative perspectives to those centrally deployed through museums or other institutions, such as UNESCO World Heritage listing, while also exploring the complexities of the past in the present and the ontology of heritage. Plural Heritages and Community Co-production will be of great interest to researchers, academics, postgraduate students in the fields of heritage and memory studies, museum studies, history, geography, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and politics. The book will also be of interest to heritage professionals, policy makers, and site managers involved in community engagement and participation.

Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum: Makers, Process, and Practice offers a new model for understanding exhibition design in museums as a human and material process. It presents diverse case studies from around the world, from the nineteenth century to the recent past. It moves beyond the power of the finished exhibition over both objects and visitors to highlight historic exhibition making as an ongoing task of adaptation, experimentation, and interaction that involves intellectual, creative, and technical choices. Attentive to hierarchies of ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and ableism that have informed exhibition design and its histories, the volume highlights the labour involved in making museum exhibitions. It presents design as filled with personal and professional demands on the body, senses, and emotions. Contributions from historians, anthropologists, and exhibition makers focus on histories of identity, collaboration, and hierarchy ‘behind the scenes’ of the museum. They argue for an emphasis on the everyday objects of museum design and the importance of a diverse range of actors within and beyond the museum, from carpenters and label writers to volunteers and local communities. Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum offers scholars, students, and professionals working across the museum and design sectors insight into how past methods still influence museums today. Through a postcolonial and decolonial lens, it reveals the lineage of current processes and supports a more informed contemporary practice.