​About the speaker

​

Richard Sandell is Professor of Museum Studies and Director of the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG). In 2019, he published Museum Activism, with Robert Janes, which explores the ‘activist turn’ in museum thinking and practice and makes the case for the socially purposeful museum.

​

​Transcript

​

Hello, my name is Richard Sandell. And I'm Director of the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries, part of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. I'm going to share some thoughts, some recent research with you today around the theme of museum activism. 

 

When we think of activism and museums were very often think of protests staged by campaigners and activists on the streets outside some of the most high-profile cultural institutions or within that galleries. 

 

Over the past decade we've seen increasing instances of these kinds of protests, strategies that are used by activists to draw attention to their cause to raise public awareness and generate media coverage of a range of issues from climate breakdown to social injustices. For example, in the UK and France, there have been numerous protests staged at large National museums and galleries by campaigners calling for an end to sponsorship deals with large oil companies. In these instances the museum is a public site one with high visibility, with a symbolic power that activists outside the organization can utilize to advance that causes and to raise public awareness of the ethical issues these sponsorship arrangements pose. 

 

In some cases, the protests initiated by people outside the museum are successful in provoking some kind of positive response from the museum. For example, in June 2020 a statue of slave owner Robert Milligan that stood outside the Museum of London Docklands was removed in the wake of a series of anti-racism and black lives matter protests sparked by the killing in the US of George Floyd a few weeks earlier. The museum stated that the statue of the prominent British slave trader stood comfortably outside its premises for a long time. It worked with local agencies to remove the statue from its plinth amid cheers and clapping from the assembled crowd. 

 

In this instance we may understand this is a progressive action taken by the museum in response to activist pressure from outside. But activism isn't always staged or initiated by people outside the museum. Increasingly, I would argue it's possible to see museums themselves initiating and engaging in forms of practice designed to harness the resources of the museum with the intention to bring about some form of positive social change. 

 

Here the impetus comes from within the museum from amongst the people who work there and seeks to affect change on the world outside. 

 

The notion that “museums and heritage body should be neutral, objective somehow set apart from the social and political worlds they inhabit” —has over the past two decades increasingly being challenged. And most recently, given the impetus from the black lives matter protests that have spread around the world, museums of all kinds, even the most mainstream and conservative ones that have traditionally viewed active engagement and contemporary social issues as beyond their remit, have begun to acknowledge that complexity in broader structures of power and oppression, and their parts in legitimizing some lives and excluding, oppressing and harming others. 

 

Within this context I want to introduce the idea of museum activism defined as an approach to museum practice shaped out of ethically informed values, that is intended to bring about political, social, or environmental change. This is a fascinating phenomenon. We might think of it as an “activist turn” in the field of museums and heritage. It is an emerging practice and it is still taking shape. But it is an area that people are becoming increasingly interested in both in my research and in my collaborative practice with range of museums. Museum activism can take many forms and can be directed towards addressing wide-ranging social, political, and environmental concerns from climate breakdown to racial injustice. 

 

But for now I want to focus on a body of work my colleagues in the research center and I have taken forward to purposely use museums to tackle the issue of disability discrimination and prejudice. 

 

Over a period about 20 years we've worked collaboratively with museums of all kinds and crucially, with activists, artists, and community members with lived experience of disability to challenge deeply entrenched negative attitudes towards disabled people and to shape wholly new narratives that foster more progressive, rights-based understandings of physical and mental difference

               

We first used the term “activist practice” about 10 years ago to refer to work that museums are doing to not only make museums more accessible and more inclusive of disability-related stories, but to purposely design and utilize narratives of disability, formed out of engagement with the disability rights movement, to shape public attitudes. At that time about a decade ago, this activist practice was emergent, tentative, very much on the margins of most museums’ thinking and practice. But 10 years on, and we can see a significant shift in the field. I'll take a single recent example to illustrate my point. It's in a gallery that recently opened at the Wellcome Collection in London and the gallery is called “Being Human.”

 

Our research center at Leicester worked in collaboration with the Wellcome Collection team over a period of about two years to help to shape that gallery. And I have learned a huge amount from that process about how museums of all kinds can take up and embed values-led and rights-based approaches to the way they work and in ways that contribute towards broader social change.

 

“Being Human” replaced an older gallery called “Medicine Now” developed over decade earlier. Many of the disabled people we worked with shared negative reactions to the gallery, and to medical museums and collections in general. They describe some aspects of that gallery as offensive, as dehumanizing, the last place on earth they would choose to visit. This helped to establish the scale of the challenge.

     

Medical museums and collections have very often viewed disability as something inherently unwelcome, something deviant, in need of a fix or cure. How could a new gallery then be shaped to open up in visitors more respectful ways of understanding difference. The gallery's curator, Clare Barlow, told us that no area was off-limits. And the disabled people who were part of our team grasped that opportunity.

     

In thinking about access, the gallery was shaped by recognition that disabled people are discriminated against by cultural institutions on a daily basis. We approach access not as a goodwill gesture, a gift of the museum to the grateful, passive audience, but as a fundamental human right. And this changed everything.

 

The team committed to a process of active listening to people with very different experiences and expertise, learning disabled people, people with different sensory impairments, neuro-divergent people, wheelchair users, alongside the consultation with medics and scientists.

 

This process of active listening powerfully shaped the way that everyone experiences the gallery today as well as specific provision for people with hearing or visual impairments. There are numerous subtle features, such as benches to view video works that is off-set, so the wheelchair users and their experience are prioritized, not pushed to the side. Listening to and working with disabled experts shaped not only access but also content.

 

In “Being Human”, unlike many medical museums, disabled people are no longer represented as curiosities for the non-disabled gaze. The political work by disabled artists take center stage and it is seamlessly interwoven throughout. What's I am perhaps most excited about the adoption within the gallery text of an explicit, ethically-informed position. 

 

Yes, the gallery includes multiple voices and perspectives of those disabled people featured alongside photos of scientists, medics, artists, and activists. But the rights of disabled people are not ever held up for debate.We are adopting, explicitly expressing, within the gallery our commitment to an ethical, rights-based, social model of disability.

 

We know from numerous studies that museums inform the way people see and think. So working in museums, we have a choice—we can work in ways that sustain negative stereotypes that continue to marginalize and discriminate, or we can use our resources and unique diction to explicitly acknowledge and draw attention to inequalities to offer ways of seeing that foster empathy, understanding and connection. 

 

Of course, this work isn't entirely straightforward. In an increasingly polarized world, museums, that adopt a position on issues that still divide public opinion, can experience all sorts of challenges and unwelcome controversy. At the same these controversies point toward the capacity for museums to demonstrate leadership in these contested arenas. With the narratives they construct and publicly present, they can contribute to the conditions within which human rights can flourish. This kind of thinking used to be confined to specialist human rights museums and sites of conscience, but today we're starting to see the potential for museums of all kinds to tackle injustices and inequalities in a purposeful way to take up the opportunity to harness their resources for greater public good. 

 

Thank you.