Participation at work in the museum

ABSTRACT

Openness and inclusiveness toward the public are mandatory aspects of contemporary museums. Museum projects and studies responding to this imperative have been frequent in recent years, but how does participation in museums unfold, and how can external partners’ contributions be evaluated and understood? Based on a practice-led and ethnographic study of a participatory collaborative design process in the Danish Museum of Rock Music,¹ I argue that questions of how participation works – rather than how much and what type of participation is accomplished – should be asked when studying and reflexively planning for participatory collaborative processes in museums. Using a descriptive, symmetrical approach inspired by actor-network theory, this study exemplifies how tracing the relations between process and end product (e.g. digital tool or exhibition) reveals the contributions of a participatory process. This approach provides an understanding of participation as something that emerges relationally and sets directions for a museum project.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• co-production
• study method
• museum controversy
• digital design
• diversity

Acknowledgments

This work was carried out at the Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials (DREAM), supported by the Innovation Fund Denmark [grant number 09-063275]. I thank the Museum of Danish Rock Music, which generously let me in and collaborated with me on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Line Vestergaard Knudsen achieved a PhD from the Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials (DREAM) and the Department of Communication, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research focuses on cultural heritage, museums and participation and has previously been conducted in collaboration with the Danish Museum of Rock Music.

Notes

1. As of January 11, 2016, the museum changed it's name to Ragnarock - Museum of Pop, Rock and Youth Culture.

2. This subdivision of ANT is sometimes called post-ANT.

3. Within post-ANT, the word program is often substituted by ‘mode of ordering’ and the coexistence of several ‘modes of ordering’ is usually underlined (Law 1994).

4. The name of a Danish music venue.

5. At certain points in the process, the young participants also had each their divergent interests. Thus, the young participants contributed to the process not only by addressing the common interests of the ‘youth expertise' but also by addressing individual interests.