Two-eyed tinkering with museum practice

Abstract

Nine years ago, the beginning of my tenure as an editor coincided with the passing of David Carr, a legendary figure in museum and library practice. One of Carr's most famous quotes, “A museum is a tool for thinking,” has guided my approach to evaluating each paper we receive. I hear his voice when I challenge authors to ensure their work can offer a insights that contribute to a global debate, rather than local interest to the people who visit the museum they study.

At the museum where I work, we support the heritage preservation work of our local Sugpiaq elders. The Sugpiaq people have continuously inhabited the South Central Coast of Alaska for over 7500 years, long before the short 2000-year tenure of the pharaohs of Egypt. Despite centuries of colonialism and attempts to erode their cultural heritage, a few elders overcame these obstacles, learned their language, and devoted themselves to preserving the cultural ways of their forebears. Now they are working to ensure their millennia of traditional knowledge will be carried forward by younger generations earning graduate degrees in western college systems.

As a maritime ecological research institute with an aquarium, we are now working to prioritize partnership with indigenous communities to ensure that all cultures have representation and voice. Rather than imposing our views, we have relinquished power to our Sugpiaq partners to shape new narratives and histories that recognize many ways of knowing the place where we work. We support their pursuit of funding and share our platform so they can reach a global audience. We prioritize the preservation of the Sugt'stun language because, unlike English where food animals are often used pejoratively, in Sugt'stun, these animal names are honorific. To see both at once is two-eyed seeing, and changes how meaning is constructed by all of us working to conserve natural systems.

I believe this issue offers readers an opportunity for two-eyed seeing of museum practice. The papers in this issue span different regions, cultures, and museum types. We have organized these papers in three groups, and encourage readers to compare these papers to those groups from the recent past. While each case study stands up to peer review, when read together, we discover new ways of knowing practice. Each museum has the strength to hold ideas that are separate, equal, and a more layered tool for thinking.

We organized the first set of papers by thinking about the affective use of the museum. Starting with Sherman and colleagues' analysis of empathy in zoo experiences, it highlights nuanced perceptions of animal well-being, and how learning how introspection itself is not counter to an exhibition's big idea. This introspection is echoed in Álvarez-Barrio and Mesías-Lema's reflection on curatorial research during the pandemic, revealing museums as dynamic spaces for artistic learning and reinvention despite restrictions on traditional use. Together, we see the value of being present with what is physically happening, irrespective of theme and exhibit intent.

The second group reimagines museum practices and experiences. Wilkin and colleagues set the stage by examining audience engagement through the lens of grave goods in the British Museum, emphasizing the importance of mixed-method approaches. The theme is contrasted by Connor's exploration of the gaming community's engagement in museums, signaling how immersive experiences upend the static nature of a museum. While the former papers focus on the user experience, Roper's paper on infrastructure in post-apartheid South Africa adds to the collection of papers published in our January 2024 issue, and helps readers link this set of three papers to the larger discussion of museums capacity for decolonizing how we witness history.

The third set of four studies focus on museum practice and representation. King and colleagues delve into the evaluation of museum exhibits, emphasizing the importance of user experience methodologies in quantifying impact. Clark and Nye's comparative analysis of museums in London, Firenza (Florence), and Canberra further enriches this discourse, shedding light on the affective entanglements of online museum spaces. This theme concludes with Yang's examination of intangible cultural heritage, underscoring the significance of cultural assets that defy materiality. Diker's Turkish perspective adds depth to the discussion, prompting reflection on the inherent tensions within museum practice when something that has always been considered an asset embedded in daily life transitions into a museum.

We close with three ambitious reviews considering the entire museum as message and gestalt. The first, by our Editor Emerita, Doering, explored Antwerp's Royal Museum of Fine Arts, while the second by Noronha and Dona explore the disruptive potency of curatorship for the emergence of other modes of power, knowing, and being. The concluding book review offers a global perspective on how the museum movement parallels changes in libraries and archives. Associate Editor, Coleman reviewed The Role of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Achieving Civic Engagement and Social Justice in Smart Cities and offers prospective readers an understanding of the urgency of seeing beyond the museum as a new way of expanding how museum practice itself may learn through broadly considering themselves contributors to the cultural enterprise, rather than a unique type of institution.

While digital tyrannies have led readers to search for papers that answer rather narrow questions in Google Scholar, I hope this editorial encourages more profligate reading across an issue. I hope it stimulates a denial of the tyranny of search engines by reading across papers that do not match the search terms. I hope readers embrace diaphor as a reading process, not just a poetic device. I encourage readers to look at dissimilarities to think in new ways. I hope that dialogues between papers on different issues can challenge conventional museum practices, making them more inclusive, and increasing how we make museums relevant for more users.