Incarceration: Museum research and practice

This special issue considers how museums can take transformative action by interrogating and addressing issues of incarceration. The contributing authors argue that examining museum practice through the lens of incarceration can help reveal and even redress the structures and power dynamics that have generated visible and invisible types of oppressive and violent carcerality. This purpose builds on and extends the contributions museums have already made—and even have spurred—to advocate on a number of social and environmental issues, including social injustice and human rights violations. In some cases, this action has responded to societal change, while in other cases museums have taken a leadership role by anticipating needs and proposing new programs and policies. For example, certain museums have played key roles in crafting pathways for reconciliation with Indigenous communities through repatriation of artifacts, explicit recognition of human rights violations, and co-creation practices that center community voices to highlight previously silenced perspectives and worldviews. Of course, much of this work stands in contrast to—and in an effort to acknowledge—museums' colonial origins. This issue sets such an approach within a transitional justice context which aims to acknowledge, recognize, remember, and interpret acts, or periods, of human rights abuses, including genocide, displacement, disempowerment, and other types of violence and repression. To be sure, addressing these issues has been far from easy, for museum collections are steeped in colonial hierarchies of knowledge and Western epistemologies, and their operations are often funded to some significant extent by state authorities that are also responsible for carceral systems.

This issue cannot claim to be the first to draw the field's attention to incarceration. Both popular and scholarly publications have generated growing awareness of museums' opportunity and ability to expose patterns of unjust incarceration, to question the very premise of carceral punishment, as well as to break down barriers and stereotypes that have long prevented formerly incarcerated individuals from equitably participating in society. Much of this work has taken the form of exhibitions and public programming, increasingly in collaboration with incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals and their families. The goals of such projects are typically to raise awareness among general visitors of the systemic injustices of carceral systems and to communicate the humanity of incarcerated populations so that they are less stigmatized. Several former sites of incarceration have led the way in this work (Kilmainham Jail in Dublin, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, the National Justice Museum in Nottingham, UK, and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, to name a few), though a wide range of art and history museums have followed in their footsteps and expanded the compass of ways the field can address these long standing issues (including Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town; the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, and MoMA's “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” among others).

Still, much work remains to be done, especially around the provenance of collections and the ethics of collecting practices. For instance, despite the fact that a number of museum collections include objects made by incarcerated individuals, this information is not often included in the collections documentation, nor is it part of how collections are interpreted. The research required to link museum holdings to industrial manufacturers who used incarcerated labor to fabricate them is simply never complete, obscuring the true source of production. Similarly, the vast majority of museums have not examined their own connections to histories of incarceration: how many of their founders and funders grew their wealth and collections through business with the carceral state? What is the relationship between the communities in which they are situated, whose histories they tell, and carceral institutions? Outside of those museums that are former penal prisons, visitors rarely know. So, while it is clear that the field is endeavoring to include histories of incarcerated individuals—both within and beyond the traditional prison context—there is still much more work to be done to address the epistemic violence in which museums are complicit because they have, intentionally or unintentionally, marginalized or erased the material culture of incarcerated individuals and their centrality to economic, social, political, and cultural history.

One way to push the field toward this wider recognition is to demonstrate the expansive universe of incarceration. Thus far, most museum efforts to address the subject have been concentrated in a few geographic locations, and almost all of them relate to penal institutions with cell blocks and bars or barbed wire to contain those imprisoned. This issue of Curator encourages a more capacious concept of “incarceration,” aiming to illustrate its centrality in world history by revealing its malleable forms and challenging museum professionals to reckon with this broader understanding. Approaching incarceration as the experience of being forcibly confined and policed to remain in confinement opens up comparisons of carceral systems across time and space, while underscoring the inequities of power that always gird incarceration in whatever guise it is crafted. In addition, most of the essays here make clear that museums are generally trying to center those who experienced incarceration rather than the perspectives of those who constructed carceral systems and institutions, or the workers who maintain a status quo.

Each paper in this Special Issue addresses the myriad ways museums are grappling with how to account for and redress incarceration. Some essays approach the concept of incarceration theoretically and through collections. For instance, Bruno Brulon Soares examines collections representing the Afro-Brazilian diaspora in Rio de Janeiro's ethnographic museums and reveals “how museums have utilized colonial methods in the classification and presentation of sacred” objects. He argues that this approach situates such objects as “imprisoned,” or “incarcerated,” objects of faith. Viewing museums as liminal spaces where relationality, negotiation, and engagement can take place, his analysis offers ways of countering the museum's historical approach and empowering Indigenous and marginalized communities to enter and interpret such spaces for their own ends. Soares then concludes by declaring that the museum can be “a place where different forms of knowledge and contesting views over heritage may co-exist,” a place that can “liberate its ‘captured objects’ from their epistemic prisons” and offer instead a “living flow of materials and meanings.”

In a similar vein, but focusing on a different category of objects, Elizabeth Carnegie and Jerzy Kociatkiewicz interrogate the use of suitcases in museum settings. Viewing suitcases as incarcerated objects in museums and historical sites of incarceration such as Auschwitz, they demonstrate how a more reflexive approach can help museums recognize their historic de-coupling of objects from people, and challenge existing systems of classification in order to embody and humanize those artifacts—strategies which visitor studies research tells us makes deeper connections with people while also producing a fuller accounting of the suitcase's meaning by examining how suitcases “are consigned to the ‘attic of memory’: as museum displays or as piles of discarded remnants, as witnessed to human loss and suffering at death camps.”

Bonita Bennett and Doris Ash urge “people-centered” histories as well, even over and beyond object-centered analysis when interpreting the intangible yet deeply embodied afterlives of slavery. Building on a wave of scholarship that underscores slavery as a mode of incarceration, their analyses also highlight the coloniality that instantiated and implicated museums in not just histories of slavery but the resonance of that past today. Bennett and Ash use this past as the basis for asking about how museums can center enslaved people in public spaces by directly engaging histories of the enslaved and by empowering and amplifying descendant communities' voices and memories. Some of this was done while Bennett served as Director of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. Using examples from South Africa and United States to draw parallels between as well as to juxtapose the techniques of oppression in each context, the authors address a central question for museums, namely how and why they should interpret enslavement and its legacies from the perspective of the embodied experiences it causes, and redressing the injustices and trauma inflicted on bodies across generations.

If one group of papers proposes new approaches to materiality and embodiment, another group of essays addresses wide-ranging forms of incarceration in the context of current or recent museum exhibitions and programs. Sun Hongfang, Guangjian Liu, and Yan Jianqiang examine a museum's ethical responsibility to its narrators and its visitors, particularly with regard to telling traumatic stories. The authors use narrative therapy theory together with museum studies of trauma and memory to discuss how the Nanjing Comfort Station Museum approached its history of so-called “Comfort Women,” Chinese women forced into sexual slavery serving invading Japanese soldiers.

Victoria Millar's paper highlights another story of incarceration that has not previously received attention in museum settings: that of the Irish women migrating to the United States in the 19th century. It discusses the Ulster American Folk Park's curatorial strategies for representing these women and their experience of imprisonment. Alongside representation of the immigration experience, Millar addresses why Irish women were disproportionately represented in the prison system in the period 1838 and 1918. Included in this analysis is the museum's approach to addressing Irish women's incarceration history given an absence of collections directly related to it.

Two more essays, both of which focus on programs, detail ways museums can support people who have experienced incarceration. The case study presented by Violet Hott, Adrienne Testa, and Leslie Bushara introduces one way museums can play a more active role in minimizing the significant disadvantages that children of incarcerated parents are likely to experience. Detailing programs developed by the Children's Museum of Manhattan and the Hands-On Museum in Olympia, Washington to enhance parent–child bonds through museum-centered visits where parents have the opportunity to guide and participate in their child's learning, both of those children's museums have begun to serve local incarcerated individuals and their families.

Sophie Fuggle and Laura McAtackney focus on the role of food interpretation in prison museums and penal heritage sites. They argue that food is a fundamental part of the lived experience of confinement and detention, yet it has been underexplored in museum interpretation. By examining the connections between the built environment of prisons and the wider landscape, personal and political experiences of hunger, and the potential of art and creativity in negotiating food insecurity, they reveal how food narratives can be utilized to engage with contemporary issues of social justice, sustainability, decoloniality, and abolition. Challenging traditional “dark tourism” approaches to prison sites, their analysis offers ways of moving beyond sensationalist portrayals of prison life to humanize incarcerated individuals and encourage deeper empathy.

Paul Longley Arthur and Isabel Smith explore the development of an exhibition representing the legacies of slavery in Australia, analyzing how slavery and incarceration are intertwined within the country's colonial history. They examine how multiple forms of unfree and coerced labor have existed in Australia but how histories of them have often been contested or silenced. Focusing on their collaborative work with the Australian National Maritime Museum, Arthur and Smith examine the challenges of curating an exhibition that reveals these pasts, particularly in representing the lives of enslaved individuals amid scarce archival records and the potential for retraumatization among descendant communities. By incorporating diverse voices, personal narratives, and multimodal content, they show how exhibitions can “bring to life silenced and forgotten histories,” address the ongoing legacies of slavery and empire, and liberate these histories from their epistemic prisons to offer instead a “living flow of materials and meanings” that challenges traditional narratives and fosters deeper understanding.

Taken together, the contributions to this issue of Curator provide a road map for the field's continued engagement on issues of incarceration. Most importantly, the essays included here make clear that museums can best encourage transformative action on these issues by considering the subject broadly, rendering visible the ubiquity and flexibility of carceral systems, their distinctive manifestations in a given time and place, but also their common reflections and residues of power and discrimination—and why it is important to recognize and address the trauma created by these systems and practices.

Whether your work produces new interpretations of carceral histories through collections (or beyond them), new programs serving incarcerated individuals and their circles of family and friends, or new theoretical connections that further underscore the prevalence of incarceration in our shared past and present, the goal is clear: Museums can heighten awareness of incarceration's role in societies around the world as well as provide a space for healing and crafting a future that charts a new direction anchored in humanity and justice.