Understanding Audience Participation Through Positionality: Agency, Authority, and Urgency

For a number of decades, museums have been challenged to rethink their relationships with visitors: from the New Museology,[1] highlighting the social role of museums in the late 1980s through a growing focus on engagement, outreach, and representation, to the concept of participation popularized in the early 2000s by, among others, Nina Simon. Since Simon defined “a participatory cultural institution as a place where visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content,”[2] researchers and practitioners have continued to consider the multiple factors that influence participation practices within museums.[3] The complexity of museum audiences has increasingly become recognized—understood as having different interests, backgrounds, and values. These diverse audiences are, however, often set in opposition to “The Museum,” a homogenous entity. But every museum is different, each uniquely shaped by its collections and its history, as well as the people who work there. By overlooking these differences, we fail to critically engage with the way that participatory practices develop and are understood differently in different organizations.