Museum Practice. Группа авторов

must negotiate, and to explore how the new museum ethics can be translated effectively into practice, the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG), based in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, embarked in 2011 on a research project with partners the Museums Association (MA) and the Inter- Disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (IDEA CETL) at the University of Leeds. The unique cross-disciplinary nature of the collaboration created a rich environment for new thinking: RCMG researches the social role of museums and engages in knowledge exchange with the museum sector; IDEA CETL helps professionals across disciplines identify, analyze, and respond effectively to ethical issues they encounter in their careers; and the MA is a membership organization for UK museum, gallery, and heritage professionals and sets ethical standards for the sector.

      Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under the “Care for the Future” initiative, the project took the form of a research network which brought together some 26 museum leaders, including museum directors, policymakers, senior practitioners, and academics (RCMG 2013), to identify and analyze key ethics issues with which museums are grappling and to test the potential value of the new museum ethics to address these issues. The primary aim of the project was to build a network of expertise in the new museum ethics. While the parameters of the grant dictated that the scale of the network remain modest, with most participants based in the UK, British contributors were joined by a number from Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Together, they represented a cross-section of museum practitioners and researchers active in social and ethical initiatives; group members expressed a range of political perspectives, but shared a set of values rooted in the belief that museums have the potential to play an important social role in addressing inequalities. Many of the conversations could be characterized as encompassing an Anglo-American perspective, but nonetheless raise important questions about ethics in other contexts. Two members of the network are representatives of the MA’s ethics committee, including Nick Merriman, the ethics committee convener. Other network members did not necessarily think of themselves as ethicists, but recognized that they were working to model ethical leadership in their practice.

Led by Janet Marstine and Jocelyn Dodd from RCMG, the research network met during five day-long workshops over 18 months (late 2011 to early 2013). Each workshop was devoted to a specific theme chosen by RCMG in consultation with partner organizations. These themes were: social engagement; transparency; shared guardianship of collections; moving beyond canonicity; and sustainability. Approximately half of the participants were core group members who attended all five workshops, creating a sustained conversation. The other half consisted of guest speakers who attended a single workshop as provocateurs.

      This chapter discusses the findings from the research network and presents preliminary ideas about how the new museum ethics might be shared and implemented within the wider museum sector. Support for the model of new museum ethics was unanimous among participants; all agreed that the model represents a powerful and productive framework through which to re-envision museums in the twenty-first century. While many questions persist about the practical implications of the new museum ethics that will require further research, responses from participants affirm the significance of the five ethics themes on which the network focused. Responses from contributors also emphasize the value for museums in forging new relationships with communities, built upon participation, mutual understanding, and joint decision-making. Through incorporating unpublished group discussions, the chapter captures the distinct voices of network participants as they collaborate, speaking freely and experimenting with new ideas. In this way, we hope to model one strand of how new museum ethics discourse might develop to chart a course for change in the museum. Comments made by contributors to the five workshops are quoted throughout the text; the Appendix provides a full list of contributors for each workshop. Where appropriate, references have been made to publications that further extend or elucidate the themes discussed.

The new museum ethics: why is change needed, and why now?

      As Marstine has described, museums are facing some of the most serious challenges in their history but the sector is unable to adapt or respond effectively to these challenges (Marstine 2011b, xxiii). New opportunities to become socially responsible are going unrecognized and unmet. Many museums are currently under-resourced and, as a result, innovative agendas to promote social engagement are often abandoned in favor of conventional approaches to practice. Financial pressures are forcing museum leaders to make choices in the short term that may compromise the work of institutions in the longer term.

Of great concern is the sector’s inadequate engagement with the shifting ethics landscape. Museum professional bodies and the museums they represent have long relied on ethics codes to define their policy and practice. Introduced by the American Association of Museums in 1925, the Museums Association in the 1970s, and the International Council of Museums in 1986 (Besterman 2006, 433–435), such codes remain the touchstone of museum ethics today. This dependence, in turn, reflects the prioritization of skill development and standard setting that characterized the museum and museum studies sectors for much of the last century. The focus on professional ethics has played a significant role in distinguishing public service from personal gain and political interests. Ironically, it has also insulated museums from social concerns in the world around them. Gary Edson’s seminal volume Museum Ethics advanced this notion of ethics as an inward looking process of professionalization; “Museum ethics is not about the imposition of external values on museums, but about an understanding of the foundations of museum practices” (Edson 1997, xxi). By contrast, the shifting terrain around museums drives a critique of common practice: change is needed to address the current and future needs of society.

      The understanding of ethics as a code has led to a “legalistic” approach that too often produces reactive and incremental change instead of the responsive and holistic thinking for which the new museum ethics argues. While there are increasingly strident calls for stronger reinforcement of ethics codes and legal interventions, the question remains: are ethics codes fit for purpose (Marstine 2011a)?

      Recent social, economic, political, and technological trends have sparked a developing discourse about the moral agency of museums that contests the authorized view of ethics. Richard Sandell has argued persuasively that objectivity is an elusive stance that imparts value through the invoked authority of the institution. Sandell uses the term “moral activism” to suggest a direction for museums to realize their potential as agents of social change both inside and outside the museum (Sandell 2007, p. x). Hilde Hein identifies what she calls an “institutional morality,” asserting that, while museums may not have a conscience, they do have moral agency (Hein 2000, 91–93, 103). Moving beyond personal and professional ethics, institutional morality suggests that, while museum staff may come and go, their activities across time and place create an institutional, and also a sectoral, ethics.

When asked why new thinking is required in museum ethics now, participants in the research network cited both short- and long-term trends in policy and practice. Figure 4.1 shows that these factors included: the shifting political climate in the UK; pressures for museums to be more accountable; and the need to make fundamental changes to the model of the museum itself, including how knowledge is conceived, notions of “who” owns what and “who” has a say in the interpretation and use of collections. However, for some participants this question only raised more questions, including what is meant by “change” and what is meant by “now.”

      A premise that underpins the development of the new museum ethics is that professional ethics codes alone do not suffice; as a default instrument of ethical practice, they do not adequately equip museums to deal sensitively and fairly with the shifting ethical terrain. Exploring this premise in the first workshop, John Jackson, Science Policy Advisor at the Natural History Museum, London, asserted that traditional ethics codes represent a particular set of values intended to prescribe how museum professionals should “properly” behave. Nick Merriman, MA project partner and Manchester Museum Director, stressed that each ethics code encapsulates the moment or context in which it is written so that it effectively becomes “fixed” in time. Director of Policy and Research, Glasgow