'Community' is a word we use a lot in museums, but what do we actually mean by it? Is it a group whose members talk to each other every day?
Or is it what the historian Benedict Anderson described as the 'imagined community'; something akin to a nation where people have not all met, but perceive a link between themselves based on shared characteristics or interests?
I would argue that museums are guilty of creating their own imagined communities. We talk of them as if they are homogeneous entities, where each person brings the same life experience and beliefs, and ultimately that they all agree.
Identity – such a complex thing – becomes too easily pigeonholed in museums. And our failure to understand communities can seriously undermine our ability to work with groups to better tell their own histories.
Over the past three years at the People’s History Museum (PHM), we have altered the way we collect. We had been collecting reactively, working with organisations that would donate material as and when they decided.
This approach meant that the collection grew steadily, but along somewhat predictable lines. But what we wanted to do was work with communities – 'imagined' or otherwise – to better tell the histories of the repressed, the minority and the sidelined. So rather than wait for material, we became more proactive, identifying gaps and putting in calls.
One area we wanted to improve was our collection and display relating to the campaign for disability rights. We have a display on the subject in our main galleries but it is radically different from other parts of the museum.
Rather than showing disabled people’s fight for equality, it includes leaflets from government job schemes and various non-descript posters. It is, in short, a passive presentation on disability rights – the disabled activist is absent.
Last year PHM was approached by a disability activist who offered to curate an exhibition focusing on the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and entirely created by disabled artists. We loved the sound of the project, especially because it complimented PHM’s ethos of opening the space to multiple voices. It linked the past with present issues, which is something the museum is trying to do more of.
As this exhibition developed, we received another approach – from a well-known disability charity that also wanted to collaborate with us to commemorate the DDA. The two projects were entirely separate: one being a temporary exhibition and the other a collaboration with a charity to collect materials to improve our collection and main galleries in the long-term.
Despite the exhibition on the DDA, and PHM’s link to the charity being part of a separate project, the two became conflated. People believed we were working with the charity to tell the history of disabled activism, and therefore the exhibition would fail to tell the story. This was not what we were doing but we were still attacked on Twitter by some people who had misunderstood.
What we hadn’t appreciated was the extent to which the history was contested, which was clearly an error on our part. But this episode did bring to light some interesting debates. In museums we want to open our doors to help communities tell their history, but who owns that history?
And what happens if the history is not only contested, but one group contests the legitimacy of another to tell it? At this point, the museum can cease to be a safe place for constructive discussion and become a place of conflict.
There is no one solution to this. It depends on the history and the people involved with it. We are still working on better ways to tell the history of disabled activism. We are going to hold a series of workshops to garner a wider range of opinions.
We want people to come and tell us how the museum can better tell the history of disabled activism and how they want to work with us to achieve this. We are simply going to sit down, listen, and respond appropriately. Hopefully the museum can act as a hub, perhaps even transforming an imagined community into a physical one.
Chris Burgess, the curator (collections and exhibitions), Peoples’ History Museum, Manchester
Or is it what the historian Benedict Anderson described as the 'imagined community'; something akin to a nation where people have not all met, but perceive a link between themselves based on shared characteristics or interests?
I would argue that museums are guilty of creating their own imagined communities. We talk of them as if they are homogeneous entities, where each person brings the same life experience and beliefs, and ultimately that they all agree.
Identity – such a complex thing – becomes too easily pigeonholed in museums. And our failure to understand communities can seriously undermine our ability to work with groups to better tell their own histories.
Over the past three years at the People’s History Museum (PHM), we have altered the way we collect. We had been collecting reactively, working with organisations that would donate material as and when they decided.
This approach meant that the collection grew steadily, but along somewhat predictable lines. But what we wanted to do was work with communities – 'imagined' or otherwise – to better tell the histories of the repressed, the minority and the sidelined. So rather than wait for material, we became more proactive, identifying gaps and putting in calls.
One area we wanted to improve was our collection and display relating to the campaign for disability rights. We have a display on the subject in our main galleries but it is radically different from other parts of the museum.
Rather than showing disabled people’s fight for equality, it includes leaflets from government job schemes and various non-descript posters. It is, in short, a passive presentation on disability rights – the disabled activist is absent.
Last year PHM was approached by a disability activist who offered to curate an exhibition focusing on the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and entirely created by disabled artists. We loved the sound of the project, especially because it complimented PHM’s ethos of opening the space to multiple voices. It linked the past with present issues, which is something the museum is trying to do more of.
As this exhibition developed, we received another approach – from a well-known disability charity that also wanted to collaborate with us to commemorate the DDA. The two projects were entirely separate: one being a temporary exhibition and the other a collaboration with a charity to collect materials to improve our collection and main galleries in the long-term.
Despite the exhibition on the DDA, and PHM’s link to the charity being part of a separate project, the two became conflated. People believed we were working with the charity to tell the history of disabled activism, and therefore the exhibition would fail to tell the story. This was not what we were doing but we were still attacked on Twitter by some people who had misunderstood.
What we hadn’t appreciated was the extent to which the history was contested, which was clearly an error on our part. But this episode did bring to light some interesting debates. In museums we want to open our doors to help communities tell their history, but who owns that history?
And what happens if the history is not only contested, but one group contests the legitimacy of another to tell it? At this point, the museum can cease to be a safe place for constructive discussion and become a place of conflict.
There is no one solution to this. It depends on the history and the people involved with it. We are still working on better ways to tell the history of disabled activism. We are going to hold a series of workshops to garner a wider range of opinions.
We want people to come and tell us how the museum can better tell the history of disabled activism and how they want to work with us to achieve this. We are simply going to sit down, listen, and respond appropriately. Hopefully the museum can act as a hub, perhaps even transforming an imagined community into a physical one.
Chris Burgess, the curator (collections and exhibitions), Peoples’ History Museum, Manchester