Graham, H;
(2025)
Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s affective work.
[Book].
UCL Press: London, UK.
Preview |
Text
Deconstituting-Museums.pdf Download (2MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Over the past 30 years, museums have turned to participation in the hope that direct involvement of non-museum staff would serve their claims to be accessible, inclusive, representative and diverse. And yet, adding participation to museums has often generated conflict, disappointment and anger. Deconstituting Museums argues that the difficulties produced by adding participatory practice arise from political incompatibility. In the representational liberal logics that underpin museum decision-making, trustees and professionals make decisions ‘on behalf of’ future generations and the public. This is a political infrastructure the book names ‘museum constitution’. Conversely, participation arises from ideas and practices from direct and horizontal political traditions, drawing those who act as facilitators into new relationships and expanding political imaginations. Through sustained engagement with theories of affect, materialism, and feminist and decolonial praxis, Helen Graham identifies techniques for deconstituting museums. She uses experimental writing as a method to turn away from the desire to right institutional wrongs and towards relational and directly negotiated ways of organising. In doing so she locates participation not as engagement but as a mode of governance that is enabled by, and enables, variant political ontologies. This is an alternative named ‘participatory worlding’. The affective work of facilitating participation has long tugged at and frayed museums’ constitutional liberal logics. Deconstituting Museums envisages how participation and its affects might be activated in reworking the politics of heritage.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s affective work |
| ISBN-13: | 9781800089136 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781800089136 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089136 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © Author, 2025 Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book's Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/4.0/. This licence allows you to share and adapt the work for non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information: Graham, H. 2025. Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s affective work. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089136 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ |
| Keywords: | museums, participation, affect, worlding, heritage |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10212738 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
