Care, repair, and the future social relevance of museums

ABSTRACT

This intervention reflects on examples of UK museum and gallery outreach and engagement activity that took place during the COVID-19 lockdown. This included creative packs sent to people who were shielding, online sessions for mental health service users, and phone services for isolated older adults, part of a range of efforts to continue connections while buildings were closed. Though seemingly limited in scale or impact, I argue that it is in these small acts of care that we might find the renewed relevance of the museum. Drawing on theoretical work on repair (notably Steven J. Jackson), the essay outlines a future social role of museums founded on “care thinking” and oriented towards the communal work of repair.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• care
• repair
• museum community engagement
• socially engaged museums
• health inequalities

Introduction

The global COVID-19 pandemic brought care into the collective in a more defined manner. The world awoke to our essential need for care as everything else came to a halt. Care also became more public, in the emergency caregiving provided by those on the frontline, the care required for those ill and dying, and demands for greater care from the state as care systems across the world buckled. In the UK, where this essay is set, COVID-19 exposed many of the existing fractures in society and its care infrastructures. Most painfully, it further exacerbated already deep-rooted social and health inequalities, with life-and-death consequences (Marmot et al., 2020). For many, the strict lockdown that was imposed following the spread of COVID-19 was experienced as a long period of isolation, cut off from friends and family, with direct negative impacts on mental health, especially for those with pre-existing conditions and with low socioeconomic positions (Fancourt et al., 2021). Our collective need for care (and for connection) was brought into stark relief. But as the weeks of lockdown dragged on,¹ the pandemic was also marked by a renewal of care – an awakening of communal solidarity through the spontaneous burgeoning of mutual aid groups and support networks (see Sitrin & Colectiva Sembrar, 2020).

Museums and galleries in the UK were often quick to respond. As venues closed, content and exhibitions were put online, and later, live-streamed tours and a range of innovative digital delivery was developed, ensuring access to culture through lockdown. Arts engagement at home played an important role in helping people cope during lockdown (Mak et al., 2021).²

In this short intervention, I wish to draw attention to the responses of the museum and gallery sector’s community engagement teams. These teams work with individuals who do not typically visit museums; people who are often classed as vulnerable or otherwise socially marginalized. Community engagement is founded on principles of access and inclusion, and is driven by local partnerships with community groups and third sector organizations. In the UK, this area of work has developed over the last 8 years to include programming focused on “health and wellbeing,” in partnership with the health and social care sector, to include people with mental health issues, people living with dementia, or those living with chronic ill-health (Chatterjee & Noble, 2013). Typically, museum engagement sessions take place in small groups, inside galleries, or in community spaces. Sessions involve museum object handling and creative activity (e.g. photography, creative writing, crafts), providing opportunities to reflect, to make, to feel inspiration and joy. This is work with material, relational and affective qualities that uses culture to connect people with others, and perhaps, at its best, to reconnect with themselves (Morse, 2021).

Elsewhere I have argued that the practice of community engagement is best understood as care work, though it is rarely described in these specific terms (though general calls for the museum to “care for people” are not new, and have also gained renewed emphasis in the last few years, which I reflect on later in this piece).³ Seen as care work, community engagement is about providing emotional and practical support for people to engage meaningfully with culture, and on their own terms. In many ways, the meaning and value of this work is defined at this intimate scale, between participants, museum workers and museum spaces/objects. When museums and galleries closed, engagement teams had to quickly reconsider how to continue working with participants at a distance, many of whom were vulnerable, shielding, and isolated.

This essay provides an impression of the activities undertaken during lockdown. It does not aim for comprehensive analysis,⁴ but rather to notice and call attention to the sector’s determined efforts to continue providing support, comfort, and connections in the absence of an open building. From the early months of lockdown, group sessions moved online, creative resources were sent to homes, and new telephone services were started for those with limited or no access to the internet. I argue that it is in these small acts of care that we might find the renewed relevance of the museum. From here, the essay comes to an intervention, drawing together care theory and notions of repair, to put forward a future social role for museums founded on practices and ethics of care, oriented (and scaled) towards the work of communal repair. The argument is positioned in the UK in response to the pandemic but the ideas can be applied further in response to the wider contexts in which museums are implicated.

Acts of care in a crisis (uploading, packaging, and posting care)

As museums closed their doors, many professionals had to quickly adapt to continue supporting regular groups. A report by the Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance (2020) documents responses from small museums and major galleries, though it is difficult to assess the scale or reach overall.⁵ The tenor of this work, however, demands pause and reflection. For engagement projects supporting vulnerable adults, sessions that regularly took place in the museum had to adapt to provide continuity of care through a distanced community. For example, Pathways to Wellbeing, a long-standing program at the Holburne Museum, Bath, supports people with lived experience of mental ill-health through a referral pathway to arts activities in the gallery. The artist-led sessions moved to weekly arts activities available to download with demonstration videos on their website.⁶ A mental health referral project at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery moved to WhatsApp, with artists sending weekly activities and participants responding with photos of their artworks. Across the sector, email chains were started, outreach sessions were delivered on Zoom, and Facebook groups were created to keep group members connected with each other and with the museum.

Museums with programs for older adults such as Imperial War Museums and the Northern Ireland War Memorial in Belfast worked closely with support agencies and care homes to continue providing cultural engagement inspired by the collections through online activities supported by deliveries of creative resources and handling boxes.⁷ This group was at particular risk of isolation, with all care home visits suspended during lockdown and for much longer after restrictions lifted. Seven Stories (Newcastle)⁸ and several Manchester-based museums⁹ developed online play provision for their parents and babies groups, another group particularly isolated during the pandemic and at higher risk of post-natal depression.¹⁰ The Fitzwilliam Museum made deliveries of creative activities to families with young children with life-limiting illness as part of their partnership program with a Cambridge hospice.¹¹ Some museums picked up the phone. The Beaney House of Art & Knowledge continued their older adults program by developing a “telecare” program for 100 people who were shielding, including people with dementia and people with visual impairments.¹²

For some museums, the response was not to continue delivering a program of activities as such, but rather to find ways to stay in touch with participants through emails, newsletters and calls. This was the case for youth engagement projects at Leeds Museums and Galleries and at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to support participants in their Creative Carers network, a group further negatively impacted by COVID-19 as they were shielding to protect others.

Postal deliveries of creative resources were a key response from the culture and arts sector, in recognition that many participants did not have affordable digital access in their homes. Some sections of the museum and gallery sector developed deliveries through partnership with local health visitors, council services, and foodbanks to reach families with the greatest need. Creative resources were added to the delivery of essential food supplies, and later museums established their own delivery services in efforts to relieve pressure from council services and support organizations. Colchester and Ipswich Museums delivered creative packs to 2000 families identified by the council as experiencing digital poverty or food poverty.¹³ The National Justice Museum (Nottingham) reached out by writing letters to people in prisons,¹⁴ while Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums sent postcards to care home residents. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority, with involvement from local museums, delivered a total of 38,000 creative packs to vulnerable young people and older people.

These paragraphs only parse the range of responses from the sector, but they give a clear sense of the acts of care that took place at the height of lockdown: resourceful and determined efforts to maintain contact and connections with regular groups, and to play a part in networks of critical support.

Theories of care (this is what care looks like)

The political theorist Jean Tronto (1993, 2013) describes four phases that together shape “good care”:

1. Attentiveness – caring about: noticing the unmet caring needs of another.

2. Responsibility – caring for: taking on the responsibility and burden of meeting those needs.

3. Competence – care giving: the work of care.

4. Responsiveness – care receiving: checking that caring needs have been met.

These elements of care are visible in the practical and affective labor of museum engagement workers that facilitate and maintain spaces of care in and out of the museum (Morse, 2021; Morse & Munro, 2015). Understanding care practices in the museum requires attention to everyday practice; the most mundane, ordinary interactions and emotions – in habitual times this would include cups of tea, small talk, and ensuring people feel welcomed in museum settings. The pandemic upended these forms of interactions, producing new forms of caring relationships: caring through the screen, on the line, with a parcel or a letter. In each case, these acts of care reflect Tronto’s four elements of care: noticing unmet caring needs – the isolation and anxiety produced by lockdown; taking responsibility to act, and doing so through appropriate (competent) means – using resources, time and technologies at hand to remain connected with groups; and responsiveness – continuously checking in with regular groups. A key quality of care is adapting to changing circumstances, since care is a matter of “attentive experimentation” (Mol et al., 2010, p. 2). The responses to the pandemic reflect museum workers’ attempts to provide “good care” in the unique context of a national lockdown. Some further initial reflections are provided here.

A clear(er) duty of care

Once caring needs are noticed, caring relations are marked out by the responsibility to act. In museum community engagement teams, care work often takes form as a moral responsibility linked to a professional sense of public service and duty of care to communities (Morse, 2021). Wider research has shown how those most vulnerable in our communities were also those most adversely impacted by the pandemic (it was never the “great equaliser” that some suggested) (Whitehead et al., 2021). The social (care) issues being addressed through museum programming before the pandemic became exacerbated during lockdown, with loneliness and social isolation felt more sharply, anxiety and depression heightened by the pressures of lockdown. In these circumstances, the duty of care is felt more intensely; the responsibility to act reflected in the range of activity delivered by museums.

These dedicated acts of care stand as evidence of teams’ deep and genuine commitment to responding to needs even in challenging circumstances. They present a statement of intent and purpose: the museum would be there even when things got tough. Buildings shut down but people were not forgotten, partners were not abandoned. Through small acts of care, the museum world would continue to provide joyful distraction and creative engagement in the darker moments of the lockdown.

Care theorists underscore our interdependencies; care is a mutual accomplishment, in which care-giver and care-receiver are bound in a mutual sense of identity. In community engagement work, I have noted how professional subjectivities, values, and ambitions are bound in a deep sense of commitment to others. Providing care in the unique circumstances of lockdown brings these dependencies into new arrangements. For some museums the focus was on continuing contact with regular groups; others developed new partnerships to reach out to those with the greatest need. From these experiences, museum professionals will very likely be reflecting on the core purpose of their work; what impact they want to achieve; and, in turn, what they expect their organizations to be and stand for. The question then becomes what to make of these answers, and what to do next.

Care work becomes visible

The pandemic brings to light some of the challenges that come with care. Feminist theorists have discussed the many ways that care work is dismissed, reflecting a society where the habit of caring for others is largely devalued (e.g. Tronto, 2013). In the museum, we see this too: community engagement is kept separate from core museum functions (see Sandell & Nightingale, 2012). The skills, knowledge, and talent of this work are not always recognized, and this work goes mostly unseen (Morse, 2021). Some of the lockdown activity has been documented and celebrated in special COVID-19 awards,¹⁵ and in some ways, this work may have become more visible as it continued during lockdown while buildings closed. However, as the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance report notes, “the skills, time and energy for this work were undervalued” (2020, p. 2). It is likely that much activity was simply “got on with,” as practical efforts led by small teams to try and keep in touch with people, and to support civil society partners overwhelmed with demand. Determined, tenuous acts of care. Greater understanding, visibility, and support for the care work of the museum may be critical to where we go next.

Too much care?

Care is embodied and emotional work. Yet the risks to staff of working with the most vulnerable groups are rarely fully assessed or considered. There is not always training, and very little supervision or “debriefing protocols” to address the emotional impact of this labor of care. Funding structures rarely include provision for caring responsibilities (see Belfiore, 2021). The impact of lockdown on staff has not yet been fully explored, acknowledged, or addressed and there are likely psychological costs to the work that took place over this period.¹⁶ It is very likely that professionals will have been exposed to high levels of depression, distress, and even death within the groups they worked with. Taking on the burden of meeting the needs of others during unprecedented and uncertain times, whilst experiencing the same restrictions, being exposed to the same possibilities of infection, facing similar isolation, or having to support families at home,¹⁷ is likely to have had complex impact on staff wellbeing. In recognition of this impact, a UK based network of care (GLAMCares) has emerged, driven by mid-career professionals with experience of delivering this work directly and supporting teams that do. It currently exists without funding and operates as a Twitter handle, an online community and support events, open to anyone working in galleries, museums, libraries and archives, offering a safe space for discussing distressing work experiences as well as providing joyful moments of community and self-care. Institutional and sector-wide responses are now needed to reflect on the hidden costs of caring through the pandemic.

Care, repair, and the future social role of museums and galleries (from broken world thinking to care thinking)

There are two components to my intervention here. The first is to notice and recognize the care work of community engagement teams during lockdown, and reflect possible impacts of this experience. This short essay recounted just a few examples of how museum community engagement teams responded through acts of care aimed at maintaining broken links between people and sources of support and creativity during a time of crisis. I want to suggest that in the acts of care that took place during lockdown, we might find the renewed relevance of the museum. Here we might locate ways forward, having moved out of lockdown: a moment to reflect on the importance of care, connections, and creativity to our lives, and within this, an opportunity to gain greater clarity on the duty of care of museums.

The case studies reported in the Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance report highlight how these initiatives provided essential support for many during a time of crisis. The report and the examples discussed here also underscore the importance of partnership working across different sectors – museums, charities, local government, health and social care. This work was meaningful because the museum reached out to support its communities. Prior to the pandemic, I began to outline a future role of the museum as a space of social care, as “as a link in a chain of caring institutions  … directly supporting the activities of health and social care organizations and their service users through museum activities” (Morse, 2021, p. 135). The museum as a space of social care is underpinned by an ethics of care that directs practical actions responding to the greatest community needs, often identified in terms of vulnerability and inequality, including health and social inequality. Collaboration with community members, service users and other caring professionals is central to this role to ensure that care is competent; museum workers are not social workers or therapists, but they are involved in society’s work of care. In the wake of the pandemic, this role is further defined. The importance of public health has been foregrounded as health inequalities have worsened, including inequalities in life expectancy (Marmot et al., 2020), and we do not yet understand the long-term injury of the pandemic in terms of mental health and the physical impacts of long-COVID. This opens up a role for museums as partners in the repair of local care infrastructures – both formal and informal structures of individual and community support. In the UK, the National Centre for Creative Health was established in 2021 with the aim of promoting the integration of cultural assets in healthcare systems, including museums and galleries, and a strategic focus on tackling health inequalities. There are here practical opportunities for museums to develop a wider caring role.

There are, however, pre-requisites. For this work to be meaningful the first step must be to embed cultures of care across the museum. This work needs to become more visible with practical arrangements in place. In the most immediate, this means recognizing the hidden toll of taking on the burdens of caring responsibilities, and the specific impact of the pandemic on these teams. Longer term, there is a need to nurture those caring professionals in the museum into leadership positions.

In many ways the notion of the museum as a space of social care holds specific orientations. But in centering care, other roles and commitments in museum work are surfaced. This brings me to the second part of my intervention, to introduce the notion of broken world thinking and the work of repair. In his essay “Rethinking Repair,” Steven J. Jackson proposes “broken world thinking” to help us better understand “the real limits and fragility of the worlds we inhabit” (Jackson, 2014, p. 221).¹⁸ The pandemic revealed what is broken in our society – the care infrastructures unable to cope, the precarious lives and livelihoods of those most vulnerable in our communities further exposed. For Jackson, breaking is “generative and productive” (2014, p. 223) and can help us locate neglect, negligence, and irresponsibility. Broken world thinking is a “provocation … towards new and different kinds of politics” (2014, p. 223), an explicit critique of a world where the habit of caring is undervalued, sidelined, or refused. I want to suggest broken world thinking can directly benefit museums studies research, policy, and practice in helping to identify the wider social contexts they might respond to. But to direct action and meaning towards the work of repair, we also need “care thinking”¹⁹ in the museum, as a practical and ethical response to broken world thinking.

For Jackson, broken world thinking locates the work of repair. In his view repair is not necessarily about fixing (fully) or a return to where we were – repair is about necessary alternatives (which we hope will be better). Jackson describes repair as

the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished. (2014, p. 222)

Repair and care work are closely related. An oft-cited definition of care is:

a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 4)

In the cases discussed here, museum activities were practical responses to breakdown as buildings closed and groups were no longer able to meet. If we start to recognize museum work as practices of care, as I have suggested in previous work and here with the engagement teams’ responses to the pandemic, we can begin to consider the work of museums in repairing broader social worlds. The responses to the pandemic are acts of care as well as efforts to maintain, continue, and repair broken links between people and sources of support and creativity during lockdown. Small acts such as picking up the phone or sending a parcel on the surface may appear mundane, but I argue it is in these discrete acts that we can locate a more profound potential. Following Jackson, acts of repair are often humble, mundane, and overlooked, yet nonetheless consequential. As Graham and Thrift (2007, p. 6) further note, “what starts out as repair may soon become improvement, innovation, even growth.” To establish such potential, we must reconnect acts of care with a moral dimension: namely, an ethics of care. Turning to feminist scholarship we find care ethics care as moral relations that shape ethical responsibility in chains of mutual responsiveness and interdependence (Barnes, 2006; Held, 2006; Tronto, 2013). Care ethics are both normative and contextual: local solutions to specific situations need to be developed to work towards “good care.” The ethics of care places the museum within entanglements of dependence in order to identify its burdens of responsibility vis-à-vis its publics and communities in a specific sense, but also in relation to an expansionary world that we individually and collectively inhabit. Care ethics foreground the public character of care, to guide our thinking by which the museum might be best used to care for, maintain, and repair our neighborhoods, our environments, and our worlds.

We are surrounded by broken things – and many of the things we care about as museum studies scholars and practitioners are implicated and in need of repair – from social injustices to crisis in nature. It is significant that the language of care (and with this, notions of carelessness and self-care) has emerged with more clarity in the last years (see Chatzidakis et al., 2020) and across international museum contexts. Care ethics are both implicit and explicit in decolonizing discourse in US museums and in response to Black Lives Matter, notable in the voices of La Tanya Autry, Yesumi Umolu, and Monica O. Montgomery, in Twitter collectives such as MASS Action and the Empathetic Museum, which also request greater care for the workforce. In their recent book Transforming Inclusion in Museums (Moore et al., 2022), drawing together reflections from a decade of the Inclumuseum website, the authors articulate the need to center caring practices as the route to achieving inclusion across the institution. In different ways, care thinking is providing resources to respond to broken things in and around the museum.

COVID-19 hit our precarious lives in ways we are still coming to terms with. After a crisis we are faced with the question of how we get back to “normal.” If a return to “normal” is unimaginable, then the answer is to take what is broken into new possibilities. Care thinking in the museum offers some important directions to those significant questions of societal repair. It requires a clear(er) articulation of museums’ contribution to society as we reflect on the long damage of COVID-19, where the sector was before the disruption, and the work that is needed today.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the museum professionals who shared their lockdown projects, and to colleagues, the editors, and the reviewer who provided comments on early drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nuala Morse

Nuala Morse is a Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her main research focus is on museum work as ethics and practices of care. Her research draws together social geography, museum studies, medical humanities and organizational studies to examine the “social work” of culture professionals, and the role of museums as spaces of social care. A related aspect of this work explores the links between cultural participation, health, well-being and recovery. Another strand of research is focused on equitable museum careers, workforce development and organizational change in the museum sector.

Notes

1 The first UK lockdown began on 23rd March 2020 and lasted until July 4th. During this period all hospitality venues were required to close, including cultural venues. A second lockdown took place over a month in November 2020, followed by the implementation of a tier system that immediately put many regions into the highest tier with further restrictions and continued closures. The third lockdown came into place on 6th January 2021 with museums required to remain closed until 17th May, with final restrictions being lifted on 19th July, following widespread vaccination of the adult population. Overall, much of the UK was under some form of lockdown from March 2020 to July 2021, with broad requirements to “stay at home.” Museums were closed, or at other times operated under significant restrictions throughout 2020 and into 2021.

2 It should be noted however that the research identifies that people who engaged in the arts during COVID-19 were the same as those who typically engage.

3 I describe community engagement work of museums as care in The Museum as a Space of Social Care (2021). This idea draws on and takes forward Lois H. Silverman’s scholarship on the “social work” of the museum and their role in creating cultures of caring (2009).

4 Further, formal research is being carried out by the author to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of this period on museum staff.

5 See also case studies collated by the Centre for Cultural Value (Gray & Wright, 2021).

6 https://www.holburne.org/learning/community-engagement/pathways-to-wellbeing/activities/.

7 For further information on this project, see: https://www.iwm.org.uk/partnerships/subject-specialist-network/connecting-sharing-learning-project.

8 For further information on this project, see: https://www.sevenstories.org.uk/blog/seven-stories-wins-best-lockdown-project-at-the-national-museums-change-lives-awards.

9 For further information on this project, see: https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/sites/default/files/2020-07/Case%20study%20-%20Muso%20Baby.pdf.

10 A type of isolation I understood acutely, with a baby girl born June 2020.

11 For further information on this project, see: https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/sites/default/files/2020-07/Case%20study%20-%20University%20of%20Cambridge%20Museums%20-%20EACH.pdf.

12 For further information on this project, see: https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/sites/default/files/2020-07/Case%20study%20-%20the%20Beaney.pdf.

13 For further information on this project, see: https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/sites/default/files/2020-07/Case%20study%20-%20CIMS.pdf.

14 For further information on this project, see: https://www.museumsassociation.org/campaigns/museums-change-lives/awards-2021/.

15 For example, the Museum Association’s Museums Change Lives award in 2020 included a COVID-19 project category, awarded to Seven Stories for its work supporting families with new-borns.

16 It is important to also note that many staff working in council-led museums were deployed to support other statutory services, including food and PPE distribution, as well as frontline support hotlines. The impact on these staff as they were exposed to the sharper end of the COVID-19 crisis has not been recognised or acknowledged, the probable injury not yet processed or discussed.

17 Is it well known that the museum profession is largely female, and many workers in these roles are likely to have taken on further caring responsibilities for their families during lockdown (see https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/women-working-caring-uk-lockdown/).

18 Jackson is writing in the context of human-technology relationships, but his thinking on repair has great purchase in other fields, as I suggest here.

19 I describe care thinking more fully in The Museum as a Space of Social Care. Care thinking brings together theoretical work on care with on-the-ground observations of caring relations in museum work.