Museum Practice. Группа авторов

to social engagement whereby museums offer educational services to the public in order both to defend the core (collections) work of the organization and also to “correct” the perceived knowledge deficiencies of both visitors and non-visitors for their own benefit. Instead, he championed a social-justice model which prioritizes: the removal of barriers to engagement; respect for human rights; strategic thinking; long-term goals; and quality learning and content. This model also acknowledges and subverts power hierarchies as it generates co-creation and facilitates informed debate. Meanwhile, Fleming argued that the National Museums Liverpool’s mission “to change lives” through its commitment to social justice, makes it a unique national museum which views its citizens as agents of social change (National Museums Liverpool 2013).

FIGURE 4.3 Participant responses to “Key issues that museums are grappling with in the twenty-first century.”

Both O’Neill and Fleming acknowledged that moving from current models of museum operation to a social-justice model is not a straightforward process. Figure 4.3 shows some of the obstacles to change identified by participants, including: a fractured museum sector that is too discipline-centric and lacks leadership; inadequate codes of ethics that also exclude certain groups from the decision-making process; an avoidance of debate; and continuing global injustice. Figure 4.4 represents some of the major hurdles to museums’ realization of their potential moral agency, namely the need for museums to: admit their vulnerability and remove “fear of failure”; be led by values rather than finances; and embed a focus on social justice across the organization.

      The group acknowledged that the commitment to moral agency varies across the museum spectrum, from municipal to national museums. Participants O’Neill and Anderson discussed the apparent disparity between local and regional museums that focus strongly on social engagement, but receive relatively little media attention and resources, and the national museums that frequently evade the social responsibility agenda by comparing themselves with their international peers and by securing media coverage and funding for their global reach. What is needed to change this situation? Head of Diversity and Strategy at Victoria and Albert Museum, Eithne Nightingale, asserted that funding alone was not the answer. Generous resources from previous UK governments for social inclusion work had led to changes at the margins, but not to the core values of museums (Nightingale and Mahal 2012). Participants agreed that the challenge is to convince museums that do not already share the values of social justice to become socially responsible, and that the discourse of ethics should be activated in order to effect this change.

FIGURE 4.4 Participant responses to “The moral agency of museums.”

Network contributors accepted that, in order to nurture a discourse of ethics, museum staff and trustees must develop the tools to identify and evaluate ethical issues and make appropriate ethical decisions. James Dempsey argued that the power of applied ethics does not rely on one method to resolve ethical issues, but draws upon a range of approaches, namely case studies, ethics codes, and values and principles (Figure 4.2). In the workshop, participants discussed the relative merits of each approach (summarized in Table 4.1). Of these methods, codes of ethics and values and principles were readily accepted by participants, although the use of non-museum case studies raised questions. However, over the course of the five workshops, IDEA CETL partners convinced the network of the efficacy of ethics discourse developed through case studies and of the complementary, interlinked nature of the three methods as a means of empowering individuals to make informed and responsive ethical decisions.

TABLE 4.1 Methods used in applied ethics: their benefits and challenges

Method	Description	Benefits	Challenges
Case study	Analyzes a specific ethical issue. Invites discussion and practical thinking about how the issue can be resolved.	Practical and relevant, can help work through a specific problem.	Case studies often lack clear guidance, framework or structure. May be too specific to be applied to other contexts.
Ethics codes	Prescriptive set of rules for “how to do ethics.” Levels of specificity over “how to behave.”	Provide very clear guidelines in particular situations.	Prescriptive approach can be alienating as it does not explain why. Imposes rules formed by the few on the many. Sees practice as unchanging. Works against creative practice. Tends to be cited for one-off controversies and then forgotten.
Values and principles	Set of high level ideas to adhere to such as honesty, fairness, integrity.	Positive and inclusive, can provide guidance for action.	Can be abstract and difficult to describe in practice. Can embody political positions.

      Transparency

      The second workshop took up the theme of transparency, recognizing both the ubiquitous and slippery usage of the term today. Marstine argued that the tensions between exposure and withholding warrant new approaches to museum transparency as an integral component of twenty-first-century museum ethics. She called for a transparency that makes the disclosure of data meaningful for constituents through contextualization, translation, and mediation, by identifying the agendas and perspectives of those “experts” responsible for framing the data. She asserted that, through equitable knowledge sharing, museum transparency has the capacity to critique and redistribute power and resources (Marstine 2012).

Three strong examples of museum transparency in action served as our case studies. Esmé Ward, Head of Learning and Engagement at Manchester Museum, took participants on a tour of the museum (the venue for the workshop) to demonstrate the efforts directed at making the institution’s values and agendas transparent to audiences. Ward showed how interpretation, permanent collection displays, and social media are used to examine issues of power and ethics around collecting and to encourage reciprocal exchange between the museum and its publics. Audiences are encouraged to be researchers and to draw on what they have learned in the museum to take action in the wider world. Then Michael Pickering explored how the context of repatriation and restoration of cultural rights to Indigenous peoples in Australia had created, by necessity, an environment of transparency at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. He explained that, although enacting transparency was a non-negotiable response to Indigenous activism and related government policy, it had now become part of the museum’s culture because it was “the right thing to do.” In our third case study, Jan Ramirez, Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the National September 11 Memorial Museum, New York, presented both the challenges and imperatives of embedding transparency into the processes and policies of the organization at a time when diverse stakeholders (including families, survivors, first responders, and neighborhood groups) are emotionally invested