Editorial

This double issue of Museums & Social Issues brings the 2019 volume to a close. The journal has been on hiatus since the publication of the previous issue due to a change in the editorial team. In his final editorial, David Bruce Allison (2018: 41) spoke of museums as ‘trusted, safe places that offer people both sanctuary from chaos as well as a forum to open critical conversations’. The world has changed significantly since this piece was published, most notably with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the social, cultural and economic consequences it has wrought. The pandemic has significantly impacted museums around the globe with most having to close to the public for extended periods and many still in the process of resuming something approaching normal operations. The world they are returning to is one in which societal divisions are all too evident, from fractious populations weary of prolonged Covid restrictions to systemic issues that the health crisis has laid bare, such as the persistence and virulence of racial inequities. As museums reopen their doors, their role as both a ‘sanctuary from chaos’ and a ‘forum to open critical conversations’ is delicately poised. These propositions are by no means mutually exclusive, but it is important that museums navigate these fraught times with care and in close dialogue with the needs of their local communities and stakeholders. With this in mind, the papers in this issue explore museums both as sanctuaries and as spaces to address important, if contested, social issues. The lessons drawn from both types of engagement may be instructive to readers as museums continue to navigate the shifting realities brought about by the pandemic.

Sydney Goggins’ article reviews ‘The 1619 Project’, a piece of long form journalism published by the New York Times in 2019 to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved people in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The project aims to unsettle the foundational narrative of US history by highlighting both the presence of African Americans and the systemic inequalities they faced (and continue to endure). Goggins assesses the project through a close rhetorical study and discusses its implications for cultural institutions, particularly in relation to the digital communication of public memory. This intervention is timely in the context of the rapidly escalating US culture wars. Initially sparked by calls to remove problematic monuments and memorials from the public sphere, this has expanded to a broader reckoning with the past. ‘The 1619 Project’ has acted as a lightning rod in these debates; the project itself has been subject to legislative moves to ban it as classroom teaching resource (Lungariello, 2021), while a core issue in the recent Virginia gubernatorial race (October 2021) centered around the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools. As such, museums are increasingly operating in highly polarized environments, both in the US and other countries coming to terms with post-colonial legacies. In these contexts, longstanding postures of museum neutrality are increasingly outmoded, and the adoption of a clear stance on an issue of social or political importance is de rigueur. Goggins’ discussion of what she views as the successes of ‘The 1619 Project’ may help here. She notes that making archival documents available in a digital format by placing them in conversation with one another not only provides a compelling way to read history but also demonstrates how collective memory is created and shaped. Such rhetorical processes – characterized by a radical transparency surrounding the construction of historical narratives – may be a useful insight for museums and archives when thinking about how to adopt and explain positions to their audiences regarding important issues.

Sophie Scheen Jahnsen tackles similar issues in her article, which explores the tensions that arise when museums adopt ‘moralistic’ viewpoints while also attempting to provide space for audience engagement. Jahnsen analyzes exhibitions on view at the Intercultural Museum and the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, both of which tackle the concept of prejudice and frame its impact on Norwegian society in distinctly negative terms. Jahnsen characterizes the tone of the exhibitions as ‘authoritative’ – while the exhibitions attempt to prompt critical thinking and offer interactive opportunities with the goal of co-producing meaning, they prime visitors to adopt a similar perspective on the issue at hand. Such approaches, Jahnsen notes, can have the unintended outcome of angering or alienating visitors. This article gets to the heart of the problems surrounding museums and democratic debate, namely in what circumstances museums should act as a moral arbiter on contested issues, and how they should deal with alternative (sometimes harmful) perspectives which may be voiced or felt by visitors. Such entanglements revive the debate over whether museums should act as a temple or forum and pose questions concerning the extent to which museums can truly become radical spaces of democratic debate that foster productive social dialogue.

Following papers that deal with fundamental issues surrounding the ways museums insert themselves into various discourse, Kristina Ter-Kazarian and Jessica Luke present their findings on the capacity of art museums to relieve stress and have positive impacts on mental wellbeing. This study adds to a growing body of research in this area (e.g., The Heritage Alliance, 2020), and is a welcome reminder of the psychological and physical benefits that museums offer to visitors. While museums have been utilized for memory care/reminiscence sessions for many years, these new insights are rendering museums as more holistic spaces of wellbeing and producing new possibilities regarding their civic function. For example, in Brussels, doctors have recently been able to prescribe museum visits to treat Covid-19 anxiety (Hickley, 2021), meaning that such programs can help alleviate overburdened healthcare systems. Moreover, quantifying such previously anecdotal sentiment adds another important way of valuing these institutions, something particularly important in uncertain funding climates.

Finally, Peter Kalenda’s article investigates the collaborative redesign of a zoo exhibit with the purpose of helping prompt visitors to adopt conservation practices in their everyday lives. Kalenda charts the work undertaken by staff at Seneca Park Zoo, New York, to redesign their Rocky Coasts exhibition and Polar Bear exhibition, with the goal of maximizing public impact through iterative design informed by regular data collection and analysis. Kalenda demonstrates the real-world impact these changes had on visitors, both in terms of knowledge acquisition and behavioural change. The study is a useful example of the painstaking work that is often necessary to hone museum communication and is a striking reminder of the ongoing and iterative relationship between museums and their audiences. Such principles will likely be increasingly important across the museum complex as museums seek to understand the appetite of new and returning audiences, and their level of comfort in the galleries.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had significant effects on museums across the globe, and it is important to be mindful of the disparate impacts on museums and museum workers. While some impacts have been felt immediately, such as permanent closures, job losses and budget cuts, the chronic effects will reveal themselves in the years ahead. The coverage of the pandemic is understandably framed in negative terms, but in some contexts, enforced closures and government supported furloughs have enabled museums to devote time to internal projects (Candlin 2021) and to reflect deeply about the presentation of their collections and the stories they tell. Among a number of developments in the UK during the pandemic, the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle announced plans to decolonize its collections (Kelly 2021), while the Hunterian in Glasgow appointed a Curator of Discomfort (Hunterian 2020). While these specific plans may have been in process prior to the pandemic, the social justice movements which gained momentum in this period coupled with time for sustained reflection created unique opportunities to rethink museums and museum practice. As museums begin to tentatively re-emerge from the pandemic, it remains to be seen what expectations and demands new and returning visitors will have, and how this will influence the work of directors and curators. It is to be hoped that museums can continue to build on this momentum in ways that might help to engage important social issues and foster substantive change. The most pressing developments that emerge in the years ahead will be charted in these pages.

December 2021