Last updated: November 30, 2023
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Podcast 145: Creating Inclusive Museums
Focusing on Inclusion in Museums
Image Courtesy of Aletheia Wittman
Dr. Porchia Moore: Hi. My name is Dr. Porchia Moore. I'm the rotating program head of Critical Museum Studies at the University of Florida.
Dr. Rose Paquet: Hi. I'm Rose Paquet. I am an independent scholar and artist living in California.
Aletheia Wittman: I'm Aletheia Wittman. I am an independent consultant and coach working with museums and the cultural heritage sector. I am in Seattle.
Dr. Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you all so much for joining us today. To kick off the conversation, I'd like to ask each of you how you became involved with the discussion of inclusion in museums. What are your stories?
Aletheia Wittman: The way that I came to this subject and personal connection with this subject, is really through starting my graduate studies at the University of Washington. I was getting a degree in museum studies. Rose and I were in the same class. We had different tracks to the research and to projects that we were doing. But through seeking out resources, voices, some practices that were emerging in the field related to inclusion that we really were looking to, to understand inclusion better, so that it could inform our research and our areas of inquiry. We were really feeling at a loss for where to go for those resources. So for us, it was really this connection that we had, that we were both interested in subjects that are leading us to asking new questions about inclusion, "Who's talking about inclusion? What are the different frameworks for talking about inclusion?"
For me, I was really interested in the lens of social justice as the fore of how I was investigating emerging curatorial issues in museums. I was interviewing people at different art museums that were talking about how they were committed to social justice. I really wanted to understand, what was the conversation like, before I arrived as an emerging scholar and person who wanted to enter the field. I was really wanting to know, "Where can I build my work from? And how can I find community in accessing information about inclusion?" Really building and making my practice one that I felt ethically good about, both as someone who wanted to work in museums and a scholar.
Dr. Rose Paquet: Like Aletheia said, we met when we were in this graduate program, both investigating questions of inclusions from different perspectives and from different projects. I'd moved to Seattle from living in Alaska and working on repatriation projects for a museum called the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska. I had experienced a sense of vibrancy around museum really being a place and a resource for the community in terms of the stories that were being told and how they did their work.
In Seattle, I was working with an organization that was offering art classes and museum visits to adults who were experiencing homelessness or recovering from homelessness. That became the focus of my work in the museology program; really trying to look at it from the perspective of people who tend to not be included in museums. In fact, I would encounter homeless people sitting outside the museum in Seattle and felt this dissonance of, "We want the museum to be for all people and for our community, and here are people who maybe we consider not part of our community, although they're sitting right here.” What are the resources we have? We have shelter. We have art. We have these things that provide wellness. All sorts of things for people." I don't think in a prescriptive way. Whatever it is, it is valuable regardless of your background. I was focusing my work on that. From the perspective of, "People who had been homeless and who were homeless, how would they want to engage with the museum? What would be meaningful to them?"
Finding and Creating a Community
Dr. Rose Paquet: That’s how we started the Incluseum—as a space that could connect people, connect ideas, and show that this is a network and there are a lot of people who care about these matters. Together we create more strength for this work to happen in the world, rather than working in isolation or in a way that you think, "I'm the only one who cares," which is really saddening and can be discouraging, so building that momentum together.
Dr. Porchia Moore: It's so interesting, every time we share that story it's like I get excited because, quite literally, discovering the work that Aletheia and Rose began changed my life. In 2011, I was enrolled in a library information science program at the University of South Carolina. I had been awarded a Laura Bush 21st Century Leadership Librarian Grant. It stands for Cultural Heritage Informatics Leadership Librarian, or CHIL Librarian. It was a small cohort of us, about eight. Our responsibility was to look across the GLAM sector, so galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and identify and attempt to solve some really critical problems across the GLAM sector for the 21st century.
My mother was a fourth grade teacher. She was largely in charge of organizing her school field trips, so I would go with her. Most weekends, instead of us going to a football game or a basketball game, we would hop in the car and go check out a historic site. My mother was really into history and culture. Her love of history and culture definitely shaped my love and passion and understanding of it. So being in this doctoral program where our entire lens was looking at problem solving across the GLAM sector. And we could also specialize, so I specialized in museums. I also earned a graduate certificate in museum management.
One of the critical issues that was really important for me is, as someone who was born and raised in the Deep South, someone who is female bodied and Black, when I would go on these trips, I would be invigorated by beauty and the history and memory, and all of that, but I would often feel like there was a lot missing, a lot of narratives missing. I really wanted to try to also understand why when I would go on these trips, I would either be the only person or one of a small handful of people of color. So that was my original guiding question in my doctoral program and my doctoral research.
Then I was really fortunate enough to be able to have a mentor and connect with other doctoral students in the education department who introduced me to critical race theory and this notion around scholarship as a form of activism. So thinking about activist scholarship and thinking about the power of problem solving within that context. Within the context of museums, thinking about repatriation, restoration, social justice, as Aletheia mentioned. I became really, really frustrated because I was not seeing language or ideology or even analytical frameworks that helped me really understand and unpack this issue of barriers to participation in museums.
Then somehow I discovered The Incluseum. I was like literally shouting, "Oh, my gosh, these people speak my language. I found my people." So I reached out. I think I heard back from both Aletheia and Rose, but I know that Rose and I spoke for well over an hour in our first conversation. I was so elated. I was looking for new language and new rhetoric, so words like liberation. One of the things that I really did not understand is why within museums we were constantly still having a conversation about diversity, because diversity is a really hegemonic term that does not in any way speak to dismantling current systems of practice or thinking about future building. So this notion around inclusion, I thought to have this collaborative inquiry space where we could all collectively unpack what that word inclusion meant for us in our little part of the globe was really, really important.
Dr. Porchia Moore: It's so interesting, every time we share that story it's like I get excited because, quite literally, discovering the work that Aletheia and Rose began changed my life. In 2011, I was enrolled in a library information science program at the University of South Carolina. I had been awarded a Laura Bush 21st Century Leadership Librarian Grant. It stands for Cultural Heritage Informatics Leadership Librarian, or CHIL Librarian. It was a small cohort of us, about eight. Our responsibility was to look across the GLAM sector, so galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and identify and attempt to solve some really critical problems across the GLAM sector for the 21st century.
My mother was a fourth grade teacher. She was largely in charge of organizing her school field trips, so I would go with her. Most weekends, instead of us going to a football game or a basketball game, we would hop in the car and go check out a historic site. My mother was really into history and culture. Her love of history and culture definitely shaped my love and passion and understanding of it. So being in this doctoral program where our entire lens was looking at problem solving across the GLAM sector. And we could also specialize, so I specialized in museums. I also earned a graduate certificate in museum management.
One of the critical issues that was really important for me is, as someone who was born and raised in the Deep South, someone who is female bodied and Black, when I would go on these trips, I would be invigorated by beauty and the history and memory, and all of that, but I would often feel like there was a lot missing, a lot of narratives missing. I really wanted to try to also understand why when I would go on these trips, I would either be the only person or one of a small handful of people of color. So that was my original guiding question in my doctoral program and my doctoral research.
Then I was really fortunate enough to be able to have a mentor and connect with other doctoral students in the education department who introduced me to critical race theory and this notion around scholarship as a form of activism. So thinking about activist scholarship and thinking about the power of problem solving within that context. Within the context of museums, thinking about repatriation, restoration, social justice, as Aletheia mentioned. I became really, really frustrated because I was not seeing language or ideology or even analytical frameworks that helped me really understand and unpack this issue of barriers to participation in museums.
Then somehow I discovered The Incluseum. I was like literally shouting, "Oh, my gosh, these people speak my language. I found my people." So I reached out. I think I heard back from both Aletheia and Rose, but I know that Rose and I spoke for well over an hour in our first conversation. I was so elated. I was looking for new language and new rhetoric, so words like liberation. One of the things that I really did not understand is why within museums we were constantly still having a conversation about diversity, because diversity is a really hegemonic term that does not in any way speak to dismantling current systems of practice or thinking about future building. So this notion around inclusion, I thought to have this collaborative inquiry space where we could all collectively unpack what that word inclusion meant for us in our little part of the globe was really, really important.
From Blog to Book
I was finishing my doctoral studies, this was a couple years ago, and it seemed like, "Wow, maybe some of this research I'm doing for my dissertation could be well suited for the book." So these different pieces started to come together about what this book could include with different reflective pieces, and then a bit of a research piece, and then a looking forward piece. I was like, "Wow, here we go. This is it. We’ve got it."
Dr. Porchia Moore: I will also jump in and just kind of say, I think, like she said, we have been talking about writing a book for a really long time. I also feel like a kind of catalyst for writing the book was, especially at the height of the quarantine and COVID-19, was kind of taking a critical assessment of the field in general. In particular in 2020, when we saw so many museums closing and people being laid off and furloughed and we saw open letters, that museum landscape seemed really, really rocky, if you will. We thought it was the perfect time to be able to take an assessment, to be able to look back, especially in light of this notion around museum activism.
Rose, Aletheia, and I were dubbed museum activists very early on. We were trying to figure out what that really meant, but we were identified as change agents. I think we all collectively felt like change agents, but I think, like Rose said, it was just a perfect timing to look back at the impact of The Incluseum as a project, look at all of these wonderful collaborators that we've been able to work with for about a decade. And how all of that synergy coming together at varying conferences, from AAM to Museum Computer Network to Museums and the Web, to AASLH, NCPH, all of these different conferences, being able to always galvanize and network with people, and continue to have these really rich, powerful conversations around inclusion. So it was really exciting for us to think about looking at where we started.
The Importance of Dialogue
Aletheia Wittman: A lot of those conversations about doing the book in general really led to a lot of conversations that became the outline for what the book was going to include. As Rose was talking about, there was this sense of we're looking back at this project at 10 years, and we're in this reflective place in thinking about, "What is it that The Incluseum has been? What are we thinking about in terms of its role?" And also what it's been in relationship with many other collaborators and people who have been asking questions, sometimes together with us at varying times. These other projects that have coexisted with us. So we wanted to start off the beginning of the book reflecting on our own personal stories. So you'll find that. We wanted to start by thinking about and introducing the question itself that brought us all together, "What is inclusion?" So we invite the reader into that background. That has kind of been the question that the project has turned on.
We move from there to a genealogy of looking back. Both at the project, but in context of the developing discourse of inclusion in museums from our specific vantage point. I think it's been very important for us to always be naming, to the reader and to people we're in dialogue with, that we're telling a story about inclusion in museums, specifically from our vantage point in this project. So situating ourselves, and also recognizing that there's a lineage that our work is indebted to that goes back decades and decades. We are picking up and adding to this emerging story of what we understand inclusion in museums to be, and that story's going to continue to change. So we needed to do the history. We needed to lay that out and to open it up. And to recognize so many of our colleagues and friends and coworkers in asking critical questions about inclusion, but we also wanted to build that book towards the future focus.
We move from past to present to future as the trajectory of the book and how it's structured. At the end of every chapter, we pose these critical questions for the reader to invite in the reader, tapping into their own experiences, which we can't speak on behalf of, but we know is part of the story that we're trying to tell. So we wanted all these invitations to consider inclusion and to think about how it's evolved in our understanding. And that we can continue to provoke questioning about it in the future, and that we all need to be doing that from our different vantage points, our different roles. The backgrounds that we bring. The localized histories or organizing, potentially, we've been involved in. So there's a bit of a back and forth we try to establish with the reader throughout the book.
That probably comes from our background blogging. You're really putting yourself out there and you're really hoping you get a dialogue. That's the whole hope. But in a book, you're a bit stuck in your own narrative. I think now that the book's out, that's been something that's been really fun, is now we really get to engage in some of those dialogues with readers because we have always thrived off of that in our work. So really, the user experience and the reader experience is the whole point of writing the book.
We move from there to a genealogy of looking back. Both at the project, but in context of the developing discourse of inclusion in museums from our specific vantage point. I think it's been very important for us to always be naming, to the reader and to people we're in dialogue with, that we're telling a story about inclusion in museums, specifically from our vantage point in this project. So situating ourselves, and also recognizing that there's a lineage that our work is indebted to that goes back decades and decades. We are picking up and adding to this emerging story of what we understand inclusion in museums to be, and that story's going to continue to change. So we needed to do the history. We needed to lay that out and to open it up. And to recognize so many of our colleagues and friends and coworkers in asking critical questions about inclusion, but we also wanted to build that book towards the future focus.
We move from past to present to future as the trajectory of the book and how it's structured. At the end of every chapter, we pose these critical questions for the reader to invite in the reader, tapping into their own experiences, which we can't speak on behalf of, but we know is part of the story that we're trying to tell. So we wanted all these invitations to consider inclusion and to think about how it's evolved in our understanding. And that we can continue to provoke questioning about it in the future, and that we all need to be doing that from our different vantage points, our different roles. The backgrounds that we bring. The localized histories or organizing, potentially, we've been involved in. So there's a bit of a back and forth we try to establish with the reader throughout the book.
That probably comes from our background blogging. You're really putting yourself out there and you're really hoping you get a dialogue. That's the whole hope. But in a book, you're a bit stuck in your own narrative. I think now that the book's out, that's been something that's been really fun, is now we really get to engage in some of those dialogues with readers because we have always thrived off of that in our work. So really, the user experience and the reader experience is the whole point of writing the book.
Encouraging Collaborative Inquiry
Dr. Porchia Moore: I'm not going to speak on the future of The Incluseum, but I think often what I envision for the book is a multitude of things. One, I envision and hope that many if not all museum studies programs read the book to learn and understand this amazing intellectual and professional journey of taking a single word and excavating, mining, expanding upon this single concept as a means to evoke powerful change in the field. It is my hope then that once people sort of understand all of this work that has taken place in the last decade, that ... I feel like really strongly that we're in a new place of change and that we're in a new cycle of looking at whether it's focusing on a new word or a new framework or a new methodology. I'm really excited about some of the emerging museum professionals that I'm meeting. My own students who are just killing it in terms of thinking about critical museum work, asking all kinds of new questions, pioneering really amazing research. So I think part of that vision, part of that hope, is that we will see The Incluseum.
Aletheia Wittman: One of the hallmarks I think of The Incluseum project from the start has been this core of collaborative inquiry. I think one of the things that's happened as a result is that it's somewhat been a platform that responds to the call of collaborators, emerging subjects or events that matter, or bring more people together in a networked way. So that has meant we kind of move I think at the speed of ... maybe trust is a good way to say it. As many people have said before, moving at the speed of trust, in that we have a lot of ideas. But sometimes to prove the idea or to get a real sense of where to place our efforts, we listen a lot to where conversations are going or open ourselves up to hear from people where they'd like us to go.
I think that at this particular time in museums, there has been such a radical remaking and resetting of all the things that museums thought were so stable and being shaken up, that there's still time to figure out what's ahead and where we should go, because there's a lot that we've all been through. There’s a lot of things that are emerging from this moment, like the unionizing movement and the conversation about unionizing. There's a lot about pay transparency and museums as workplaces that are beholden to kind of the ethical discourses about how people are supported, their mental health, their overall wellbeing. So how are museums becoming those places of work that have the bars set high and help set museums out to be a model instead of lagging behind.
One thing that I think we can share a little bit more about is also just our collaborative process as authors, which I think many might relate to as the pandemic has been happening. We've all kind of shifted communication styles. The nature of work has shifted. As we've been talking about the book, things have been thrown up in the air. We, as authors, I think writing a book together, where we all contributed to every chapter--I'm curious to hear from Porchia and Rose a little bit about that experience of creating a new kind of collaborative model for even writing the book. That was responsive to the pandemic. We kind of go through all these things in the book of what our collective realities were like. We start right there because that was our background when we were putting the pieces of this book together.
We tried to be explicit about a little bit of how it happened, in the book itself, to pull back the veil of even, what does writing a book look like these days? Especially one of this kind that is really connected to a decade of work. Our coming to that and having conversations about it. Being transparent and sharing that with readers. I'm curious if Porchia and Rose wanted to say more about that collaborative class of writing.
Aletheia Wittman: One of the hallmarks I think of The Incluseum project from the start has been this core of collaborative inquiry. I think one of the things that's happened as a result is that it's somewhat been a platform that responds to the call of collaborators, emerging subjects or events that matter, or bring more people together in a networked way. So that has meant we kind of move I think at the speed of ... maybe trust is a good way to say it. As many people have said before, moving at the speed of trust, in that we have a lot of ideas. But sometimes to prove the idea or to get a real sense of where to place our efforts, we listen a lot to where conversations are going or open ourselves up to hear from people where they'd like us to go.
I think that at this particular time in museums, there has been such a radical remaking and resetting of all the things that museums thought were so stable and being shaken up, that there's still time to figure out what's ahead and where we should go, because there's a lot that we've all been through. There’s a lot of things that are emerging from this moment, like the unionizing movement and the conversation about unionizing. There's a lot about pay transparency and museums as workplaces that are beholden to kind of the ethical discourses about how people are supported, their mental health, their overall wellbeing. So how are museums becoming those places of work that have the bars set high and help set museums out to be a model instead of lagging behind.
One thing that I think we can share a little bit more about is also just our collaborative process as authors, which I think many might relate to as the pandemic has been happening. We've all kind of shifted communication styles. The nature of work has shifted. As we've been talking about the book, things have been thrown up in the air. We, as authors, I think writing a book together, where we all contributed to every chapter--I'm curious to hear from Porchia and Rose a little bit about that experience of creating a new kind of collaborative model for even writing the book. That was responsive to the pandemic. We kind of go through all these things in the book of what our collective realities were like. We start right there because that was our background when we were putting the pieces of this book together.
We tried to be explicit about a little bit of how it happened, in the book itself, to pull back the veil of even, what does writing a book look like these days? Especially one of this kind that is really connected to a decade of work. Our coming to that and having conversations about it. Being transparent and sharing that with readers. I'm curious if Porchia and Rose wanted to say more about that collaborative class of writing.
Take the Time
Dr. Porchia Moore: This is going to sound very Hallmarky, or whatever, but it's true. It did not feel, for me, like anything other than the beautiful way that the three of us have always worked for the last decade. The warmth and the empathy and the grace that we give each other all the time, the care. We're special to one another and I just think it shows up in how we communicate, how we write, the process for ... As Rose said, I think even when sometimes we're texting one another or we'll have a Zoom check-in, I think that over the years we've just always respected one another, and have always been collectively inspired by the other.
So for me, the process, it just was more sort of formalized, if you will, because we had the outside entities of the editors and the publishers, but really and truly, it just felt like a continuation of how we have been working, whether it's the blog or whether it's workshops or presentations at a conference. I mean, Rose and I, we had a presentation way long ago. I think 20 ... I don't even know. It was at an AAM conference in Atlanta. It was myself, Rose-
Dr. Rose Paquet: And it was Margaret Middleton. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Porchia Moore: Mm-hmm, Margaret Middleton. Was it even an hour, Rose? We were just like, "Oh, we're not going to do this anymore." We chucked our whole entire presentation. But I think, also, we've done that probably way more than once. We're very responsive, because I think that we're also very reflexive. I think that process of being responsive and reflexive, and just very empathetic and passionate allows us to have a particular way that we work. We're not scripted. I mean, we all sort of come from academia, but I don't think we function in any way as "normal academics." I think we just have a very unique, common ethos that works for us. I don't think everyone could step into the process, but we've been sort of like this since the beginning, so I deeply appreciate it.
Dr. Rose Paquet: Me too, so much. And that this way of working together, for me, also mimics the ideas we want to amplify through our work with The Incluseum. And through the book, too, of being responsive, taking time to listen, and that we can't have this sense of urgency if we're trying to build trust. We're putting that in practice through our relationship and our work together. To me, that is super special, and gives integrity to the whole endeavor.
Dr. Catherine Cooper: Thank you all so much for joining me today.
Dr. Porchia Moore: Thank you so much, Catherine.
Aletheia Wittman: Thank you, Catherine.
Dr. Rose Paquet: Yes, thank you.
So for me, the process, it just was more sort of formalized, if you will, because we had the outside entities of the editors and the publishers, but really and truly, it just felt like a continuation of how we have been working, whether it's the blog or whether it's workshops or presentations at a conference. I mean, Rose and I, we had a presentation way long ago. I think 20 ... I don't even know. It was at an AAM conference in Atlanta. It was myself, Rose-
Dr. Rose Paquet: And it was Margaret Middleton. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Porchia Moore: Mm-hmm, Margaret Middleton. Was it even an hour, Rose? We were just like, "Oh, we're not going to do this anymore." We chucked our whole entire presentation. But I think, also, we've done that probably way more than once. We're very responsive, because I think that we're also very reflexive. I think that process of being responsive and reflexive, and just very empathetic and passionate allows us to have a particular way that we work. We're not scripted. I mean, we all sort of come from academia, but I don't think we function in any way as "normal academics." I think we just have a very unique, common ethos that works for us. I don't think everyone could step into the process, but we've been sort of like this since the beginning, so I deeply appreciate it.
Dr. Rose Paquet: Me too, so much. And that this way of working together, for me, also mimics the ideas we want to amplify through our work with The Incluseum. And through the book, too, of being responsive, taking time to listen, and that we can't have this sense of urgency if we're trying to build trust. We're putting that in practice through our relationship and our work together. To me, that is super special, and gives integrity to the whole endeavor.
Dr. Catherine Cooper: Thank you all so much for joining me today.
Dr. Porchia Moore: Thank you so much, Catherine.
Aletheia Wittman: Thank you, Catherine.
Dr. Rose Paquet: Yes, thank you.
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