Community participation and the role of the museum in a municipal environment.

A day at the Summer School on Museums, Cultural Diversity and Management of the University of Antwerp.

This year’s summer school at the University of Antwerp, organized by the Department of Cultural Management focused on museums, cultural diversity and management (1-8 July 2010). This focus was chosen because of the increasing importance of the notion of cultural diversity for museums, especially when operating in an urban context. As part of the Management Department of the University of Antwerp, the summer school wanted to question how new insights on the museum as a meeting place for different cultures can be implemented in museum management and management functions as marketing, HRM, education and collection management (link).

Each day lectures were given on themes that are related to the subject of museum and cultural diversity, such as education, collections or marketing. One day was reserved for community participation in museums, called The museum: institute versus network organization. A topic about community participation and heritage communities, for which I was asked to contribute. In this short blog I will give a short summary of this interesting day, where specialists like Elizabeth Crooke of Ulster University, David Fleming of the National Museums of Liverpool and Marc Jacobs of the Flemish Interface for cultural heritage reflected on the subject.

Elizabeth Crooke – Senior Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies, School of English, History and Politics at the University of Ulster – talked about the work she has been doing the past decade on community museums in Northern Ireland. She started her lecture with illustrating the ways in which museums and community have been considered in museum theory. First there is the research on community identity and the meaning of objects, how communities are represented and how artifacts are used to define identity. Secondly there is community development and how social policy in the UK on social inclusion and cultural diversity has been developed in the past ten plus years. The final viewpoint starts with the community movement itself. Social activism borne out of looking at issues of democracy, empowerment and conscientization, in other words communities that are interested in social transformation, like the women’s movement or lesbian and gay communities.

In her presentation Elizabeth Crooke focused on the question: 'What is the purpose of museums and community heritage to social movements?' Illustrated by examples of the community museums of Northern Ireland like the Apprentice Boys of Derry Museum and the Orange Order Museum. Basically, heritage is being used to reach the goals of community movements, like social transformation, empowerment and conscientization. Heritage is then used as a means to communicate this message. The museum or the exhibition is not a goal in itself. Crooke concluded that the illustrated examples demonstrated that history and heritage are used by social movements because the past provides the justification for leadership, through telling the history of the community. Finally she remarked that the way community movements use heritage must also encourage us to revisit the idea of the museum.

In his contribution Museums and cultural diversity David Fleming talked about his experiences as head of the National Museums Liverpool. Illustrated by examples such as the International Slave Museum, which explores both the historical and contemporary aspects of slavery, telling stories of bravery and rebellion amongst the enslaved people. With this lecture David Fleming made a plea to tell the hidden, often uncomfortable histories. When museum professionals can take a stance, they should do so.

Marc Jacobs, director of the Flemish Interface for Cultural Heritage (Belgium), talked about the museum and its network and the role of the museum professional as a cultural broker, illustrating this by the example of the Museum of Ethnology in Vietnam, where prof. Nguyen Van Huy succeeded in creating links with the local community through – for example – bringing puppetry theatre into the museum and displaying eye-opening exhibitions on Hanoi life under the Subsidy Economy 1975-1986. 

In my lecture Community Museums Past and Present I tried to reflect on the future of community participation in the museum by drawing a parallel with community arts in the Netherlands. While the research on community museums focusses on the relationships between heritage, the community and the museum, community art concerns the relationships between the community, art and society. Now, there are some interesting parallels to be made, especially when we take into account that community arts have increasingly come into the spotlights the past decade in the Netherlands. These developments can be of use for community participation in museums. Museum professionals agree that the museum should no longer be a temple, but a forum, and traditional museums are rethinking their basic functions, try to re-invent their collections to be more relevant for society and are trying to find new ways of reaching out to their communities. By doing these history museums are struggling to combine their traditional functions with their new role in social development. Reaching out to communities requires an investment and a whole set of new skills.

Problems arise when evaluating this new museum. Should it be evaluated on the quality of their basic functions or on its efforts to engage communities? In community arts the process is more important than the end result and social development is the main goal. Maybe museums that make the choice to work with communities should have a central focus on community development as well?