Caring Spaces: Individual and Social Wellbeing in Museum Community Engagement Experiences

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the narratives of participants in museum community engagement projects in Scotland. Emphasis is placed on how taking part in museum community engagement projects can have a positive impact on the participants’ wellbeing. This qualitative study employed a dialogical research strategy, which involved careful and mindful choreography of the context and space within which interactions between researcher and participants emerged. Semi-structured walking interviews with five participants were conducted in the summer of 2019 at two museums in Glasgow: Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and The Lighthouse. All participants had taken part in at least one museum community engagement project in Glasgow. Participants’ narratives reveal the positive impacts that “caring spaces” engendered through museum community engagement work have on overall feelings of wellbeing, achieved through deep processes of critical reflection, which resulted in enhanced self-esteem and confidence, and a heightened awareness of participants’ situated ontology in the context of broader issues of social inequality and identities. Museum community engagement projects, when practiced and experienced as “spaces of care,” have a critical role in enhancing individual and social wellbeing amongst participants themselves, particularly in terms of identifying long-term educational and self-worth legacies.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum community engagement
• individual and social wellbeing
• spaces of care
• public sociology
• walking interviews
• Scotland

Introduction

This paper explores the narratives of participants in museum community engagement projects in Scotland. Over the last decade, greater focus has been placed upon community engagement as an approach to build stronger connections and collaborations between museums (including art galleries) and communities with the aim of increasing learning, wellbeing and public participation.¹ Considering national and local outcomes in relation to cultural institutions, the Scottish Government’s “A Culture Strategy for Scotland” makes the expectations of cultural services explicit, particularly with regards to tackling inequality, social isolation and exclusion.² Furthermore, Museums Galleries Scotland has recently published aims and strategies that outline the prime concerns for the museum sector more specifically, emphasizing its potential to improve both individual and societal wellbeing and to empower visitors through support and learning programs.³ These aims are encompassed within Scotland’s Public Health priorities, particularly priorities 1 and 3 that aim to improve the vibrancy of communities and the mental wellbeing of the Scottish population.⁴ Furthermore, The Scottish Government’s 2017–2027 Mental Health Strategy emphasizes that mental and physical health are equally important to improve the overall wellbeing of the population.⁵ Evaluations of Arts on Prescription programs – or social prescribing through arts – have noted the usefulness of community-based arts to improve health.⁶ As museums have been positioned as key assets to communities’ wellbeing in helping to meet local health and wellbeing goals and sustain the wellbeing of the public⁷ and offer ample possibilities for arts engagement, museum community engagement projects can be regarded as a key tool in this regard.

The majority of museum community engagement projects, aiming to engage “hard to reach” museum audiences, have been designed in line with the understanding of the potential of art and artifacts for identity-work, self-reflection and sensemaking.⁸ Furthermore, projects can take different forms. For instance, reminiscing sessions involve a discussion of participants’ personal memories, with objects serving as prompts.⁹ These sessions are often held outside the museum venue, with themed “loan boxes” of objects being taken directly to participants, allowing them to handle the objects – functioning as stimulus for discussion.¹⁰ The most popular types of programs, however, are those designed for participants to express themselves creatively¹¹ through arts, craft and photography and/or designing, curating or contributing to museum exhibitions.¹² Multi-sectoral projects where museum work is performed in collaboration with the healthcare or higher education sector, for instance, have similarly been shown to be effective to improve participants’ mental health and wellbeing.¹³

Discussing past experiences in museum community engagement work has been found to be useful in reflecting on lived experience, reconciling the past and reframing narratives.¹⁴ This has similarly been noted in the context of maintaining identity through long-term or chronic illness. Professor Helen Chatterjee et al. found in their “Heritage in Hospitals” project – a collaboration between University College London (UCL) Museums and Collections and UCL Hospitals – that handling museum objects was beneficial in helping participants restore a sense of dignity and identity after a prolonged period of illness; with the objects acting as catalysts for reminiscing and the sharing of life stories.¹⁵ The process of reflecting on past experiences, be that in reminiscing sessions, educational or creative programs, have therefore been framed as having therapeutic potential; in essence, museum community engagement projects are spaces of “care.”¹⁶

Arts engagement is associated with lower levels of mental distress and higher levels of life satisfaction overall¹⁷; as a vehicle through which arts engagement can be experienced, museum community engagement projects can provide a space in which improving participants’ wellbeing is both an explicit and implicit aim. Indeed, taking part in museum community engagement projects has been shown to have positive effects on self-esteem and confidence, recovery after illness and building social relationships.¹⁸ Overall, it positively impacts wellbeing and contributes to improved quality of life.¹⁹ As such, that museums and art galleries are socially impactful for individual and social wellbeing is evident. This study makes a contribution to the emerging body of academic knowledge on the role of museum community engagement work for enhancing wellbeing, particularly in terms of identifying the long-term educational and self-worth legacies for participants.

Research design

Participants and projects

Five participants, who were recruited with the help of three gatekeepers, participated in walking interviews. The gatekeepers worked in the field of museum community engagement and acted as a conduit through whom general information about the research was shared with people who had taken part in a wide range of projects across Glasgow. Potential participants were invited to contact the researchers directly to express interest in taking part. The sampling strategy was purposive; participants had to be over the age of 18 and have experience in taking part in a museum community engagement project. No assumptions were made about participants having had a positive experience of their project; participants were free to express both positive and negative experiences should they wish. In the end, five people from two projects were interviewed; three men and two women.

Arli and Joseph took part in a project that involved people who have experienced homelessness as part of a collaboration between museum community engagement practitioners and a homelessness advocacy charity. The main focus of the project was to examine representations of poverty through art. Part of the project involved participants visiting a museum resource center, providing them with an opportunity to explore a wide range of art and artifacts in the city’s archives that are otherwise not available to the public. During the visits, specialists provided detailed descriptions of the history, context and meaning of pieces that were of interest to the participants who, in turn, were provided with opportunities to ask questions about the art and to develop their own impressions of the extent to which representations of poverty were reflective of the reality of their own experiences.

Alexander, Poppy and Ben had previously accessed the support services offered by a Glasgow-based charity that is focused on enhancing people’s mental health and wellbeing. The project was co-created by practitioners from the charity, museum community engagement practitioners and sociologists from a university. The purpose of the project was to explore participants’ understandings of identity, community and society by interpreting art through the prism of sociological concepts and theories. This involved participants taking part in day-long, dialogical learning experiences at a museum resource center and the charity offices over a period of ten weeks. The sessions were facilitated by the sociologists and museum practitioners who encouraged participants to develop their own sociological interpretations of art, which represented an issue or topic that they felt connected to. In both projects, participants produced works that formed the basis of publicly available exhibitions.

Method

The research was conducted in the style of Public Sociology, which acknowledges and prioritizes knowledge emanating from within marginalized communities.²⁰ Public Sociology practice is compellingly dialogical, which requires careful and mindful choreography of the context and space within which interactions between researcher and participants emerge; in essence, researcher and participant become co-creators of knowledge.²¹ Inspired by Freire’s²² principles and practices of dialogue, participants’ narratives emerged through semi-structured walking interviews in museum settings. This approach allowed for personal and rich data, with “thick” descriptions. During walking interviews discussions can occur naturally, thereby eliciting more spontaneous data, whilst effectively breaking down the researcher/researched power dynamic that may arise in formal interview settings.²³ Interviews were conducted over a period of two weeks in the summer of 2019. All interviews took place in Glasgow; three at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and one at The Lighthouse.

The method allows further contextualization of the experiences expressed by the participant through placing them in a physical context.²⁴ As the walking interviews take place “on location,” the information shared by the participants does not merely rely on their memory since the location can function as complementary in offering memory prompts.²⁵ We hoped that walking interviews would be conducive to enabling participant-led discussion and this was certainly the case. For example, the participants stopped to comment on pieces of art or artifacts that they had encountered in their projects; sharing their impressions and interpretations of the work, how it made them feel or how the work informed their own writing or photography in shaping the exhibitions of which they were curators. These were participant-led, poignant moments which opened up opportunities for further exploration, elaboration and reflection on their experiences of the museum community engagement projects.

The project was granted ethical approval by an internal university ethics panel. Standard protocols for ensuring participant informed consent, confidentiality and wellbeing were implemented throughout the project, and in the reporting of data participants’ names have been replaced by pseudonyms. The interviews were recorded with the consent of the participants and were transcribed verbatim. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis, where re-occurring themes are made apparent in the data.²⁶

Results and discussion

Participants indicated that taking part in a museum community engagement project had been an overwhelmingly positive experience, with some describing it as “transformational.” Throughout participants’ narratives, evidence emerged of the positive impact the programs had on their overall wellbeing. The two themes to emerge from the rigorous process of thematic analysis were: A caring and critical space; and Legacy and sustainability.

A caring and critical space

Participants explained how a supportive, caring and non-judgemental space was integral to having a positive experience of the community engagement project. The skill of project facilitators in reassuring participants, who might initially have felt reluctant to engage, resulted in a space which enabled open conversation and discussion and where storytelling could occur without judgement.

I think that his [the facilitator’s] support, his encouragement … I don’t know if I could have – I think if someone believes in you like that, believes in your abilities like that – is something that is important for anybody. (Alexander)

Project participants also supported each other in feeling secure to share their opinions, experiences and express their emotions openly:

I think, in the project, we were all supporting each other throughout. There were times when somebody wanted to leave halfway through it, or that would get upset halfway through it or something like that, so we were sort of supporting each other through that. (Ben)

All participants reported that the caring space for dialogue and reflection, and the support of facilitators and peers, had been key in building confidence. For Arli, engaging with museums, which were previously characterized as prestigious and out of reach by the participants, was significant:

It’s [taking part in a museum community engagement project] also to do with confidence and stuff. Because everyone’s heard about Glasgow Museums and they’ve got like, a really good sense of prestige attached to them and I felt like, when doing the project, I felt like pretty fucking awesome! (Arli)

They further reported that taking part in the museum community engagement projects had encouraged them to raise critical questions about social inequalities that concerned them or that they had an experience of themselves. The questioning stance engendered throughout the projects had encouraged participants to embark on a process of self-reflection:

The program was designed to kind of, you wouldn’t learn quantum physics or anything. But you would learn a lot of yourself (…), I liked it because it was different. (Joseph)

This process of self-reflection further cemented a sense of confidence and agency in raising critical questions about the world around them, through the prism of creating or interpreting art. One of the projects involved participants taking photographs illustrating their own lives, which enabled them to further explore, with others, issues of social inequality that they had experienced and wanted to challenge:

I wanted to just take a photo of an empty cupboard, like with no food in it (…) that is actually one of my major memories of poverty when I was growing up. (Arli)

Different people see different things in art, and these interpretations were often expressed through participants’ own sense of identity and experience. Engaging with art, and sharing interpretations of art with others, resulted in participants making sense of their own lives, and better understanding themselves. Poppy took part in a project which involved interpreting art through sociological concepts and theory:

As soon as I saw this picture [Monster by Jo Spence], this photograph, I resonated with it right away and tears just started to fall down my face (…) our bodies may be getting fixed, but our minds are being destroyed. And that’s exactly what I went through. (Poppy)

Poppy saw something of herself in this artwork, which sparked important moments of critical self-awareness and reflection. Participants’ personal troubles not only resulted in their being drawn to particular pieces of art, but an emerging sociological imagination encouraged Poppy to mobilize an understanding of the mind–body dualism in the context of the politics of women’s bodies, in her interpretation of Spence’s photograph.

In line with previous research, participants depicted museums community engagement projects as spaces of “care,”²⁷ within which practical and emotional support were integral to their positive experience. The safe, inclusive and non-judgemental environment that was engendered by project facilitators was essential to enable dialogue and participant explorations of personal histories, and it is in sharing these stories that we see the essence of a “caring space” which is so pivotal to effective museum community engagement projects.²⁸ Supported by facilitators, participants felt empowered to engage with and interpret art through the lens of their own experience. In so doing, participants were able to acknowledge the value of their subjective knowledge and experience, which often resulted in positive re-evaluation and reflections on their identities and capabilities; yet another example of the wellbeing and “care enhancing” possibilities of arts engagement work.

Just as critical as the relationship between participant and facilitator, were positive, supportive relationships between project participants. For participants in this research, interpreting art through personal experience in safe ways, was only possible in the secure knowledge that their peers understood the challenges of living with mental ill health, or the realities of being a homeless person. A significant characteristic of both programs lies in the encouragement of a “reflexive project of the self,”²⁹ which inevitably resulted in a heightened sense of self-awareness and criticality in conceptualizing participants’ situated ontology in the context of broader issues of social inequality and identities.³⁰

Legacy and sustainability

Participants’ narratives indicate the long-term legacy and sustainability of these museum community engagement projects. As a direct consequence, participants were inspired to make use of new skills and learning garnered through each project, such as feeling confident to write about their experiences or considering how best to make use of the knowledge gained through future learning opportunities:

And the whole thing about the program as well, I was like “I’ve got the tools, I can use these tools” (…), it made me think differently about things and that is something really positive with the program. (Alexander)

A newfound confidence meant that many participants were able to disseminate their work with other people in different forms and forums. Some presented their work at academic conferences and co-produced publications with museum practitioners and academics, whilst others now feel able to encourage their family and friends to explore art and museums, which previously might not have been a consideration for them:

I was standing up on stage [at a conference] speaking about what I’m telling you today, you know, and I thought I would never- even in the classroom at school - I could never stand up and speak. And yet, look at me now. I may not think I had the confidence, but I have. (Poppy)

Participants’ stories reveal that taking part in their projects had been a stepping-stone for pursuing opportunities that previously would have been discounted. For some, this meant further study, for others it meant taking on educator or peer support roles in other community-based projects:

Now Ben and I, we are doing a Peer Support Group, us two, we run it together. It’s about half a dozen of us (…) we meet them every Monday. It just gets people out their houses, just to sit and have a wee cup of tea and a wee gab, because some of them don’t have that, you know what I mean? So, it’s encouraging them to leave the house, you know? (Poppy)

Gaining confidence enabled participants to create plans for the future, and to discover and explore opportunities they had previously not considered or had felt were unattainable. Participants appreciated the opportunity to work closely with museum practitioners and academics, and in so doing, demystifying the rarefied and privileged worlds of museums³¹ and higher education. Indeed, participants were explicit in their acknowledgement of the ways in which mutual trust, respect and confidence between themselves and facilitators, directly influenced their own feelings of enhanced self-esteem and confidence. Participants felt prioritized by the facilitators, in terms of being listened to, but also in terms of acknowledging the authenticity of their experiences and knowledge in ascribing meaning to art.

Conclusion

This study explored the narratives of participants who had taken part in museum community engagement projects in Glasgow. The study contributes to the emerging body of academic knowledge in the area of museum community engagement work, by providing a nuanced insight into the wellbeing-enhancing benefits and legacies of engaging with museum art and artifacts through planned community-based or focussed projects. Participants’ narratives revealed the positive effects on their individual and social wellbeing, which are illustrative of the role of museum community engagement in achieving the Scottish Government’s Public Health Priorities.

The criticality of participants’ interpretations of art and artifacts often resulted in the emergence of powerful, counter-hegemonic narratives through which they acknowledged, reflected upon and questioned their own experiences of structural inequalities, social exclusion and stigmatization in the context of mental health challenge and homelessness. Interpreting art and artifacts through self-reflection in museum community engagement projects not only enables participants to explore personal histories, but for participants in this research, there was a mobilization of enhanced levels of critical knowledge that overtly challenge stigmatizing perceptions of mental illness, poverty and hegemonic ideals.³² The legacy of “spaces of care” is instantiated in participants talking about their experiences at museum sector conferences, writing academic papers and encouraging others to explore art and museums. Museum community engagement projects, when practiced and experienced as “spaces of care,” have a critical role in enhancing individual and social wellbeing amongst participants themselves, and the wider communities within which the projects are situated.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our appreciation for the fantastic participants who shared their experiences with us. We also need to acknowledge, and thank, the facilitators of the projects that participants experienced, whose work is far too often unheralded. The project would not have been possible without the financial support of The Carnegie Trust.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.

Notes on contributors

Linnea Wallen

Linnea Wallen is a PhD Candidate in Public Sociology and Psychology at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Her research focuses on how memory is understood, conceptualized, and engaged within museum community engagement work in Scotland.

John R. Docherty-Hughes

John R. Docherty-Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Public Sociology. He has over two decades of experience in community-based and focussed Sociology education and, more recently, was the lead practitioner on a Scottish Government community engagement project which brought together the worlds of museums, mental health advocacy and Public Sociology.

Notes

1 Lackoi et al., Museums for Health, 7; Scottish Government, “Public Health Priorities,” 2; Morse and McCann, “Becoming a Change Maker,” 3.

2 Scottish Government, “Culture Strategy for Scotland,” 8.

3 Museums Galleries Scotland, “Delivery Plan,” 4.

4 Scottish Government, “Public Health Priorities,” 8.

5 Scottish Government, “Mental Health Strategy,” 2.

6 Stickley and Eades, “Arts on Prescription,” 727.

7 Lackoi et al., Museums for Health, 7.

8 Munro, “Museums Community Engagement Programmes,” 58; Newman and McLean, “Capital,” 480.

9 Froggett, Farrier and Paursandiou, Who Cares, 8; Jamieson and Addington, “Luvin’ Life,” 11.

10 Smiraglia, “Object-Based Museum Outreach,” 238; Chatterjee, Vreeland, and Noble, “Museopathy,” 164.

11 Lackoi et al., Museums for Health, 27.

12 Morse, Spaces of Social Care, 8.

13 Docherty-Hughes et al., “Experts by Experience,” 268.

14 Camic and Chatterjee, “Public Health Interventions,” 67; Munro, “Doing Emotion Work,” 47.

15 Chatterjee, Vreeland, and Noble, “Museopathy,” 164.

16 Morse, Spaces of Social Care, 186; Morse and Munro, “Museums Community Engagement Schemes,” 357; Munro, “Museums Community Engagement Programmes,” 54.

17 Wang, Mak, and Fancourt, “Arts and Mental Distress,” 1.

18 Chatterjee, Vreeland, and Noble, “Museopathy,” 164.

19 McKeown et al., “Art Engagement,” 29; Chatterjee and Noble, Museums Health and Wellbeing, 4; Newman and McLean, “Capital,” 492.

20 Nyden, Hossefeld, and Nyden, Public Sociology, 1.

21 Docherty-Hughes et al., “Experts by Experience,” 267.

22 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 39.

23 Kinney, “Walking Interviews,” 1.

24 De Leon and Cohen, “Object and Walking Probes,” 200.

25 Evans and Jones, The Walking Interview, 849.

26 Braun and Clarke, “Using Thematic Analysis,” 77.

27 Morse, Spaces of Social Care, ix.

28 Munro, “Museums Community Engagement Programmes,” 54.

29 Giddens, Modernity, 2.

30 Docherty-Hughes et al., “Experts by Experience,” 279.

31 Newman and McLean, “Capital,” 492.

32 Docherty-Hughes et al., “Experts by Experience,” 279.