The Museums & Civic Discourse Project

Robin Grenier, UConn  

http://bit.ly/1SOhSdV

Feedback from a colleague who attended our NCPH Working Group session on March 17, 2016 in Baltimore.

This Google doc distills the notes captured during the Museums & Civic Discourse working group at NCPH 2016. Were you there? Please feel free to add comments to help us fill in any points we missed during this fast-paced gathering and discussion. Not at NCPH? No problem. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and comments, too.

This presentation sets out the format and questions that guided our NCPH Working Group. In addition to the named collaborators, a roomful of NCPH colleagues who came to observe the session also participated in small group discussions. They contributed their ideas on index cards, which are being posted to this blog.  

This colleague’s contribution echoes the Museum & Civic Discourse Project’s insistence that to engage social inequalities we must also engage the institutional inequities that limit museums’ ability to serve as credible partners to diverse constituencies. 

We asked colleagues attending our session to help us think about gaps in our current thinking---and historical knowledge--- about museums’ roles in civic discourse. The need to bring intersectional theory and research approaches to bear on this area of study and practice emerged as a major theme.     

The concerns expressed above put me in mind of the 2015 New England Museum Association session “#MuseumsrespondtoFerguson: Bringing Race Into the Foreground,” co-led by our Museums and Civic Discourse project collaborator Aleia Brown and the always thoughtful Linda Norris. The points they raise in their reflections on the session remind us that change is inherently discomforting and risky: http://uncatalogedmuseum.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-would-you-do.html

NCPH colleague who attended our March 17, 2016 Working Group session shares thoughts on issues our planned digital-first volume should address.