​About the speaker

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Dr. Jennifer Bergevin is the Programme Director for Socially Engaged Practice in Museums and Galleries at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research advocates for a more nuanced understanding of the impact of activist museums within the complex lives of visitors. 

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​Transcript

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Hello! My name is Dr. Jennifer Bergervin. I am the Program Director for Social Engage Practice in Museums and Galleries of the School the Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. I think it's fitting to begin a video about “stories of change” by starting with my own. When I was studying for my master’s degree in museum and artifact studies, I went on holiday to Amsterdam. While there, almost on a whim, I visited the Anne Frank House. During that visit, I was overwhelmed with emotion.

 

I'd read Anne Frank's diary, but being in the space where she, her family, the van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer hid for over 2 years was a wholly different experience. Towards the end of my visit, I found myself in the exhibition: Reflections, which includes a film in which people reflect on what Anne Frank and her story means to them. In it, actress and writer Emma Thompson muses on the kinds of things that Anne Frank would have done with her life, had she survived.

 

 “I think if she lived, she would have written books. She would have helped others. She would have used her extraordinary intelligence to organize our thoughts about the world. I think she would have loved generously and without prejudice. I think she would have had great courage. I think she would have spoken up for the dispossessed. And I think that she would have tried to storm the invisible barriers that separate human beings and keep us in such conflict. So what I say now, is that, the only thing we have to remember is that all her would-haves are our real possibilities. All her would-haves are our opportunities. And her books are like flames, a torch. We can light our own candles, and take them and luminate our hearts. With the incandescence of her spirit. “

 

That was the moment when I wanted to know how many people sitting around me would turn Ann Frank’s “would-haves” into their own opportunities. I wondered whether museums like this one actually made a difference and what difference they made. What did people's lives look like when they left the museum? Did they return to their lives hardly changed or profoundly changed? 

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That's when my own story of change took off in earnest. I spent four years researching the impact of activist museums, museums working towards positive social, economic, and political change. I would like to share with you a bit of what I found, how that has changed the way I think about impact and why this is important for those of us and the museum and heritage sector.

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 The sector has been concerned with impact in recent years as more as more organizations have been tasked with providing evidence of their value to society. And quite often this evidence is being tied to funding. Arguably publicly funded institutions have a greater responsibility to prove their positive impact to their stakeholders—the public. However, I want to take some time to unpack “impact” as the concept and the implications underpinning it. Let us start with the word "impact" itself. Freelance community artist writer and consultant Francois Matarazzo wrote in 2015. 

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“The problem is that ‘impact’ suggests something forcefully striking an object, (impact) like a die impressing itself on a blank. It implies an active agent, and the passive recipient, a subject and an object. The metaphor is freighted with potential violence... 

The metaphor does not acknowledge participants as active, autonomous individuals, capable of interpreting, responding to, or even rejecting the experiences of an art project, or the intention of those who had offered it. “

 

Often when researchers have conceptualized and studied impact, they've done so with a focus on the institutions’ effect on visitors, rather than in terms of a negotiation of understanding experiences, emotions, and beliefs. When we examined studies which have been conducted to capture the long-term impact of museum visits on people, we often find that they there is an emphasis placed on the museum visit as “the most important intervention” to have taken place in the visitor’s life during the time scale of their respective study. The results often focus on “retention,” conceptualizing impact as a set of learning objectives and exhibition names, and asking whether visitors absorbed these messages. Many studies failed to capture how visitors interact with, incorporate, reject, or respond to messaging from the museum in nuanced ways.

 

Finally, many of these studies had reductive concepts of the visitor. They are describing them as either the sum of their demographic information, or as a set of motivations and agenda for being in the museum. This prevents researchers from developing a more complex understanding of who visitors are, why they're visiting, what experiences they bring with them, and what meanings they draw from those visits. Within this discussion, we need to pause to consider who is permitted to define “impact,” when it comes to visitor studies research and museum evaluation more broadly. Rarely does that definition come from the visitor themselves, arguably the person best placed to do the defining. Instead, it is often a researcher, a member of staff. Sometimes impact is defined by funding bodies. But what happens if we simply asked visitors whether they felt their museum visit made a difference in their lives? What if we ask visitors to tell us about that difference in their own words? What if we stop thinking about impact in terms of our own preconceptions, based on learning objectives or exhibition aims?

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I argue that: what we are missing from our understanding of the longitudinal impacts of museum visits, is a highly contextualized, nuanced picture of the ways visitors conceptualize themselves and their Museum visit as one part of their lives. I argue that we need to reframe our understanding of impact, it is better to think in terms of stories of change, a story which takes place over the course of a person's life. And which a visit to museum is potentially only one small part of a chapter. When we pivot to this way of thinking, that, rather than "impact," we're thinking in terms of a process of change, of transformation. It requires us to think about how change happens and what change looks like, and how people recognize and define that change for themselves. 

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Let's take a brief pause. To think more specifically about how we understand change and what the process of change entails. To do this, I've drawn upon three theoretical frameworks from the fields of emancipatory learning and clinical psychology, which, taken together, form the basis for an approach to impact from stories of change. 

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Specifically I brought together concepts from “critical pedagogy,” “transformative learning theory,” and the “transtheoretical model of change.” Across these three, we find that change usually begins with a critical awakening—A moment where the individual moves from being unaware to aware. Often this includes becoming aware of systemic inequality, but crucially, the individuals own place within those oppressive structures. Critical pedagogy calls this "conscientization". Transformative learning theory calls it a “disorienting dilemma.” And the transtheoretical model of change categorizes this as “moving from the pre-contemplation to contemplation stages”. However we might term it, this is the moment when an individual is faced with new ways of being, thinking, feeling and understanding in the world—which does not fit with his current worldview.

 

Following on from this, individuals go through cycles of critical reflection, trying to understand how their thoughts, feelings, and actions fit within this newly aware state of their world. It's important to note that, although we call these stories of change, “change” is not at all guaranteed. Change is a nonlinear process, which often includes periods of regression to previous ways of thinking, feeling, being, and acting. Individuals can become stuck along the way, being unsure how to progress without support or further complementary experiences. It can also be the case where individuals may never experience that moment of awakening.

 

Thinking about impact of stories of change allows us to be more nuanced in our understanding of impact. It celebrates these complexities, the cycles of understanding and reflection, the challenges of being confronted with new ways of seeing the world, and confronting your own role within the world. We should think of the story of change as “ongoing”—For some, it may be a continuous journey of developing better understandings of the world and, as a result, better ways of being in the world. For others it may take multiple experiences and cycles of reflection before their journey begins. This way of thinking about impact takes into account not only cognitive and behavioral aspect, but also the effects of nature transformation as an emotive process. It is also important to know that varying strategies, experiences, and stimuli will be more or less effective, depending on where an individual is along their narrative of transformation. Finally, narratives of transformation are unique to the individual and take into account a range of contributing experiences, life events and relationships. 

 

What might this mean for those of us who are concerned about the role of museums within people’s stories of change? Firstly, we must give up the notion of the primacy of the museum visit within these stories. That is not to say that museum visits cannot play a significant role in transforming someone's worldview, but we cannot take the museum visit in isolation, separate from the myriad of other experiences that people have, which contribute to their understandings, beliefs, and feelings. We must also think about where along the story the museum visit takes place. From someone who was well-versed in issues of systemic inequality, a visit to an activist museum will play a different role, to person who has not yet become aware of those inequalities. The museum visit may be the spark that awakens that individual, or it might further entrench the visitor, who is not yet at the point where they can accept other ways of viewing the world. 

 

For the last five minutes or so, I want to share some of the findings for my research which helped to illustrate the roles that museum visits play within visitors’ stories of change and how, when we consider impact as “stories of change,” this might manifest in our research. The first thing is to say that when visitors spoke about their museum visits and the impact they had on their lives, they generally fell into distinct categories. Museums remind us of the past, yes, but also reminds us to stay connected and remain vigilant in the present. Museums raise awareness of different worldviews, events, perspectives, and ideas. Museums foster deeper understandings of the past and present, of others and of ourselves. Museums inspire action to communicate differently, to do things differently, and to be different in the world. And museums reaffirm transformative pathways. For those already working in social justice movements or community-based initiatives, visits to activist museums recharge their batteries and reinvigorate their desire to continue this work. 

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These categories emerged from interviews, where visitors were asked to define the role of the museum for themselves, placing the power to define impact in the hands of the people best placed to understand it, within the complex, nuance tapestries of lived experience—the visitors themselves. As well as for language around these roles, it emerged that, often visits to museums play multiple, overlapping roles in people's lives. And also for some—no role at all. Crucially, what appears to have been the most important factor, inand whether or not the museum visit was an event that led to changes within someone’s life, was the development of affective connections during the visit that is, empathetic and emotional connections with people from the past and people at the present. Visitors who were able to develop these connections were far more likely to have said the museum visit played a role in their lives in some way. 

 

Finally, I want to return to the idea of contextualizing museum visits within the wider tapestry of people's lives. Remember, one of the criticisms of this kind of research is the emphasis on the museum visit to the exclusion of other experiences. When asked, visitors spoke about the roles that formal education, lived experience, media, and interestingly, other visits to heritage and cultural institutions played within their stories of change. For some visitors, the museum visit was the most important part of their story of change. Like this visitor, who was the owner of a nursing school: “I left out of the center and wanted to know what can I do for the people in my community. So when I got back to my school I decreased my prices, and the students in the class cried and they were like, we've been struggling to pay for this.”

 

For others, the museum played a much smaller part. Like this visit man who found that volunteering and practicing medicine internationally played a more pronounced role in their life: “The museum is one contributing factor. It's one thing where you become aware of an issue that you didn't necessarily know much about. And learning that it still continues to be an issue today. That combined with other experiences, number one, in provides context to other experiences that you have had, and number two, it nudges you in a certain direction to perhaps do something about it, getting actively involved.”

 

What happens when we stop thinking about impact on our terms as researchers or museum practitioners? But rather, we think about it as a nuanced, contextualized and highly individual experience. What happens when we asked visitors to define the impact of visits to museums for themselves, and contextualize within their own lived experience? We find that the museums can and do play a role in visitors’ lives. But that role is contingent upon who the visitor is, the experiences that they have, the emotional and empathetic connections they make during their visit, and the wider circumstances of their lived experiences. We find that, for some people, visits to museums can make a profound and significant difference in their lives and in turn, the lives that they touch. While for others, visits to museums may be, as our previous visitor put it, one contributing factor, a nudge.

 

Understanding all of this can help us develop more thoughtful museum experiences and more empowering methods of collaboration and evaluation. It can help us argue against the artificial and unhelpful methods of judging the social value of museums based solely on footfall or quantitative data gathering. I can remind us that what we do matters and that we have a part to play in imagining and creating a better, more just world. Thank you.