The policy column - Museums Association

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Conference 2024: The Joy of Museums booking open now – Book before 31 March 2024 for a 10% discount

The policy column

Let's learn from our overseas colleagues
David Fleming
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Working internationally is complex. There are many aspects to consider and much uncertainty. There are language barriers, cultural differences, political issues, travel problems, time differences and so on.

But international work and dialogue can be immensely rewarding, and I don’t just mean in the financial sense.

It is a fact that British museums lead the world in many ways, and what happens in Britain always influences what happens elsewhere.

We can be sure, for example, that the Museums Association’s (MA) Museums Change Lives initiative will influence museums the world over. Similarly, when the MA revises its code of ethics, this will have an impact on the global museum community.

But it is also vitally important that British museums are able to listen to and learn from colleagues overseas. I’d like to think that the days of British museums behaving in a superior and imperialistic way are over, and that it is now becoming more common for genuine international cultural dialogue to be the norm.

For example, in a country where we have great freedom of speech, it always strikes me that the British museum sector has hamstrung itself in its long-standing pretence that what happens in museums is ‘neutral’.

The impetus for museums to be ‘political’ tends to come from overseas institutions, where perhaps the importance of museums as agents of free speech and ideas is valued more highly than in the UK. So, long live international museum dialogue.

There will be delegates from more than 10 countries at the MA conference in Cardiff this month; I hope it continues to grow its international flavour.

David Fleming is the director of National Museums Liverpool and the vice president of the Museums Association


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