Why is participation in museums so difficult?

We’ve been facilitating participation in museums for decades now. Exhibitions have been co-produced. Collections have been co-developed by those with passionate interest and deep knowledge. Events have been co-designed and co-delivered. Community members have been invited to sit on trustee boards.

But just as there has been a proliferation of participatory museum practice there has also been a proliferation of critical dialogue about the nature of museums and participation between practitioners, researchers and those enrolled as participants.

A strand of critique draws attention to the lack of breadth of participative work that it is too focused on small numbers and has failed to have an impact on persistent demographic inequalities in museum visiting.

Another strand of critique is concerned with the lack of depth, that power is never satisfactorily devolved and authority not shared. Those of us facilitating participation in museums find ourselves somehow caught – never efficient enough and never ethical enough.

I’ve felt it myself. I’ve found myself in very similar political quandaries again and again where museums appear to want participation but then find they don’t, not really. Rather than rail against this as unethical or in any simple sense “wrong”, it’s become helpful for me to see this in terms of a political incompatibility.

There is a certain political logic at play within museums. It is not ever present but it is always available and ready to be activated. It is a political logic you can see at play in museum mission statements, the ICOM Museum Definition and the Codes of Ethics.

It is based in abstract ideals of posterity, inclusion, access and representing diversity. It is based in abstract constituencies of future generations, the public and everyone. It is based in a certain tension between conservation and access and therefore between the future and the present.

This political logic is defined by the language of “should”. To legitimise its own ideals and accountability to abstract constituencies, it is a political logic that has to be concerned with large-scale impact.

When combined, these elements lead to a requirement for museums to balance out interests – between everyone now and future generations as well as between different groups within the public – and to make decisions “on behalf of all” and for a greater or common good.

This political logic has come to define public institutions as well as notions of professionalism and is used in justification of trustee governance arrangements. It can be thought of as representational and liberal. It is a civil society companion to representational liberal democracy, where elected representatives make decisions on our behalf. I’ve come to think of it as “museum constitution”.

Participation derives from a completely distinct political logic. Participation draws on logics of direct democracy and peer governance where decisions are made by those they affect. It is about relationships, mutual aid and accountability. It is about means, not ends.

It works when small is considered beautiful. Its approach to scale is not to scale up, but to scale out. Its future is lived in the present, prefiguratively, and not deferred. It is drawn to particularity rather than representativeness. Rather than “should”, it is the language of “doing” and “being together”.

Therein lies our problem.

Let’s take a very practical example of this tension – text editing of a participatory exhibition. The group has developed an exhibit and has written text.

It is based in deep knowledge and has been written with careful concern of how it will be received by specific people they know and whose history they share. The text arises, in other words, from group decision- making and ideas of accountability based in networks and relationships.

The museum edits the text using its usual editorial guidelines. This is based in research knowledge of how visitors engage with text in exhibitions. It is also based in an idea of who their visitors are, which is informed by demographic research and profiling.

The museum editor invariably finds the text is too long, too complex and not accessible. The editing arises, in other words, from wanting to make the exhibition accessible for as many people as possible and to ensure the needs of this specific group are balanced with the visitor in general.

In essence, the clash comes about because both the group and the museum text editor are acting within coherent and long-established political logics, which come into tension in the translation from group accountability to public accountability.

Another example. A community member is invited onto a trustee board, a move that could be seen as the very top of the ladder of participation.

But if they are asked to sign up to and take responsibility for stewarding the political infrastructure of “on behalf of” thinking, then the scope of impact will likely be constrained within existing realities. While who is involved is changed, what is not changed is the representational logic of accountability and decision-making.

Participation has been too often seen as if it offers a better way of realising the representational ideals of museums. Tying participation to its genealogy in direct democracy makes the category error clearer.

There is a reason why panels and consultative process leading to recommendations remain widely used in museums – and indeed why many projects that start out as if they are participatory find themselves turned into consultation by the end of the process.

Consultation processes offer means of increasing the number and range of voices without interfering with “museum constitution” and its “on behalf of” logic.

It might be that it is here that many museums will find they (actually) want to stay. Perhaps understanding the limits of belief in participation as a form of politics – and therefore not doing participation in a half-hearted way – might help prevent the worst harms created by undelivered promises of sharing power.

But participation is a different political beast. Inviting participation into museums has changed its facilitators – it changed me – through being exposed to new ideas and new ways of being with others.

The difficulties created by the political incompatibility described above never fully define what happens in participative museum projects – participative museum projects are also magic, confronting, painful, joyful and a million other things in the back and forth of bringing something new into being together.

It is because of this social excess – necessarily unplanned and uncontainable – that participation has already started to undo, to deconstitute, the representational logics at play in museums. And it is through this constitutional fraying and social excess that participation also opens up new possibilities for political and organisational design – possibilities that rework participation not as engagement but as governance.

Helen Graham is associate professor at the Centre for Critical Studies in Museums, Galleries and Heritage, University of Leeds. Her book Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s Affective Work is published open access by UCL Press

Museums and participation: What is it, exactly, that we’ve been doing? A free online talk with Bernadette Lynch and Helen Graham, 16 October, 1400-1530