What’s happening now? Tracking the political actions affecting cultural institutions | May 30, 2025

“When people start targeting the telling of history, that becomes very dangerous for democracy.”

The above quote is from my GWU colleague Melani McAlister, speaking to the Washington Post about President Trump’s recent decision to fire all the members of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation––a committee of nine historicans who oversee the Foreign Relations of the United States (the FRUS) publication series to ensure that U.S. foreign policy decisions are accurately and appropriately documented.

Unfortunately, the telling of history is being targeted in lots of ways now. One of the defining features of the early months of this adminstration is how much energy is being put into constraining the institutions that support history, culture, and education. On May 20, Doug Bergum, Secretary of the Interior released a directive that all properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction, including parks, monuments, and museums, must identify whether they “contain images, descriptions, depictions, messages, narratives or other information (content) that inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).” The public is also be encouraged to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.” Truth-telling is no longer the goal.

In another dangerous moment for democracy, the Texas 5th Circuit ruled on May 23 that public library patrons have no right to receive information under the First Amendment. Meanwhile, new social studies standards in Oklahoma would introduce students to disproven theories about “discrepancies” in the 2020 presidential election. The case is currently before the district court, although it’s not looking good for those challenging the new standards.

Over in Australia, there has been controversy around the Queensland Literary Awards after a $15,000 fellowship was rescinded from Indigenous writer K A Ren Wyld over social media comments about the conflict in Gaza. The decision was made by Queensland Minister for Education and the Arts John-Paul Langbroek, who said the government had “taken the decision that this award should not be presented at the State Library.” Several of the panel judges for the award resigned after the decision and a group of First Nations storytellers wrote a powerful open letter in solidarity with Ren Wyld. Wyld’s manuscript documents seven generations of stolen First Nations children in response to the Bringing Them Home report. As the First Nations storytellers write, “There is a great irony to this accusation being deployed against a Stolen Generations descendant as part of an attempt to strip them of resources to tell the true history of the colony’s violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”

Despite the pressure to conform to narrow versions of history, historians and others are using their power and expertise to challenge the Trump administration. This week, for instance, Professor Martha S Jones, J.D., PhD and Professor Kate Masur, PhD filed a brief against the birthright citizenship executive order to provide historical perspective in the birthright citizenship case and show how free Black American activists fought for birthright citizenship. Another history that is just about to be rewritten to tell a more complete story is that of the 15 daguerreotypes of enslaved people that Harvard University agreed to relinquish after settling with Tamara Lanier, a descendent of two of the people in the images, who sued the school in 2019. As Lanier told Hyperallergic, “The time is always right to do the right thing.” The photographs will be going to the International African American museum in South Carolina.

If you’re following the actions affecting the Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS), Kelly Jensen has written up a thorough timeline. Jensen is hoping to build a more collaborative timeline of events and is seeking contributions from those including affected institutions. Add to her publicly-editable document: A Timeline of IMLS Cuts, Lawsuits, Impact to Libraries, and More.

The Council of Past Presidents of the National Council on Public History recently undertook a special fundraising effort to cover the costs of NCPH memberships for colleagues who are suffering financial insecurity due to recent actions of the federal government, raising enough for 100 memberships. You can self-report your need using this form.

Are you a librarian attending the Philadelphia for ALA Annual? Arrive a day early and learn to Organize Your Library! Join other library workers to develop skills, build solidarity, and learn more about organizing and collective bargaining.

Finally, my heart cracked last week as news broke about the fatal shooting of two Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.––an institution where many of my students work and intern and where several staff are alumni of the GW Museum Studies program. The tragic event occurred one day after it was announced that the museum had received a $30,000 grant to pay for additional security in light of a growing climate of antisemitism and in recognition that the most recently opened exhibition, LGBTJews in the Federal City, might bring additional attention to the museum. That exhibition is co-curated (with Sarah Leavitt) by my brilliant former student, Jonathan Edelman and “is the first of its kind to explore DC history, Jewish history, and LGBTQ+ history together, drawing from the Museum’s robust LGBTQ+ archive.” The museum has just reopened, so if you’re in the DC area, now might be a nice moment to visit.

A LAST MINUTE ADDITION… According to a post on TruthSocial, Trump has fired Kim Sajet, director of Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, for being “a strong supporter of DEI.” Sajet was named director in 2013. As noted in the Washington Post, “It is unclear if the president has authority to dismiss Sajet. The Smithsonian’s programming is not under the purview of the executive branch, and personnel decisions for senior-level Smithsonian museum positions are made by Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III.” More to come.

What’s Happening Now? is my attempt to make sense of some of the political actions affecting cultural institutions right now. If you’ve got resources to share or something to add, please reach out or leave a note in the comments. I look forward to connecting with you.

What’s happening now? Tracking the political actions affecting cultural institutions | May 14, 2025

Over the last several months, the attacks on cultural institutions have been relentless. I’ve been tracking political actions affecting museums and other linked institutions on a public document for a few weeks, but that action feels too little for the scale of assault on our institutions so I’m going to dust off the ol’ blog to try to connect the dots about what’s been happening. My focus will be on the actions in the US, but not exclusively so. Political actions affect cultural institutions everywhere and can bleed over from one context to another. I’m still feeling out how regularly I’m going to post and the kind and scale of update I’ll be sharing, but I’m inspired by Liz Neeley’s great missives figuring out what to focus on now & next in science and higher ed.

On Thursday, May 8, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was fired with a two-line email, stating that her position was terminated effective immediately. The first woman and the first African American to hold the position, Hayden was confirmed in September 2016 by President Barack Obama and had one year left on her term. On Saturday, May 10, the Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter received notification that her position was also terminated. Permutter lead the U.S. Copyright Office (a position appointed by the Librarian of Congress). The day before she was notified of her dismissal, the Copyright Office issued part three of a pre-publication report on AI that included questions about the use of copyrighted materials in the training of AI systems––notably of interest to Elon Musk. By Monday, May 12, it was announced that Todd Blanche, the lawyer who represented President Trump during his 2024 criminal trial had been appointed acting Librarian of Congress, although LOC staff members pushed back on the change, reportedly preventing two officials that Blanche had appointed to senior roles from accessing the agency’s headquarters. Now Congressional Democrats have requested an investigation into “the possible unauthorized transfer of congressional or Library data to executive branch agencies and personnel.” (H/t @ChrisGeidner, who has his own piece on the events online) Meanwhile, Rolling Stone has a piece out featuring an unnamed “expert” on the LOC, who raised questions about Trump’s access to the LOC’s Congressional Research Service (CRS), which “provides confidential advice to Congress, including confidential legal advice, and there is a database that has all the questions that every member has asked for the last 50 years and the answers.” That sounds like the kind of data that needs to be protected.

It’s not just personnel under attack at the LOC. On May 12, Ryan Cordell shared on Bluesky that the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) has been shut down.

Some sad confirmation from @bcgl.bsky.social while I was at UW last week—the National Digital Newspaper Program—which builds Chronicling America—has been shut down Historical newspapers are probably the archival material most used by the general public—for genealogy, local history—it’s such a loss

[image or embed]— Ryan Cordell (@ryancordell.org) May 12, 2025 at 10:28 AM

NDNP was a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), and it just one of many, many important projects at risk. Tribal libraries are also feeling the pressure from cuts. On May 11, NBC reported that the Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) had notified “more than a hundred libraries on federally recognized tribal lands across the country that… their congressionally appropriated grant had been terminated midcycle.” It’s not an exaggeration to note that the implications of these cuts will be significant.

There is some good news, however. Yesterday, Rhode Island district court judge John J. McConnell Jr. issued a preliminary injunction to halt the elimination of IMLS and two other federal agencies in a case brought by 21 states’ attorneys general, writing that “the States have demonstrated irreparable and continuing harm from the Defendants’ de facto dismantling of IMLS, MBDA, and FMCS.” Publishers Weekly have a helpful write up.

Alondra Nelson’s public resignation from the National Science Foundation and Library of Congress should be required reading for anyone thinking about how they can use the power they have in this moment:

Exit (leaving) and voice (speaking up) need not be mutually exclusive strategies. My resignations are both, an exit that amplifies the voice of others. By departing these advisory roles, I aim to speak more clearly in my own language about what they have become and what they ought to be. This is not an abandonment of loyalty to these institutions’ missions, but rather, its highest expression.

Taking a different approach, the Authors Guild and a group of scholars and writers announced that they have “filed a class action lawsuit (PDF) against the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), its leadership, and officials within the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) for unlawfully terminating millions of dollars in committed grants from funds appropriated by Congress for the programs.” Meanwhile, if your institution has been affected by NEH cuts, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, have been offering advice on supporting and advocating for the NEH, including creating a website measuring the impact of the NEH Grants 2025.

Long-time museum advocates Gretchen Jennings and Rose Paquet have just launched a new substack called Museums Act Together to be a hub for information and support. They plan to “[share] information about museums and other cultural institutions that are being defunded, censored, or otherwise pressured to shift from presenting authentic and well researched content” and “[publish] accounts from museums that wish to share (publicly or anonymously) their challenges and responses.” Their first post has a ton of links and resources.

Finally, I leave you with words from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s recent piece, Why We Need the National Endowment for the Arts:

We are in a cultural moment where critical thinking has become synonymous with cynicism. Our government and larger media have spent decades telling us that the anxiety and desperation and deep loneliness that characterize most of American life doesn’t ultimately matter when the economy is doing great. The instinct, in the face of so much of American life denying reality, is to fall into the reflex of calling things out, of meeting every gesture of expression with a sneer. But that is not how anything is repaired. To resolve, to move forward, to understand in any way, means at a certain point you have to declare what it is that you actually care about, what you actually want to fight for.

I know what I’m fighting for.

Is there something that you think that should be included in future posts? Get in touch.

Upcoming Event: The State of Museum Ethics Today (an online conversation)

In 2023, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), Museums Association (UK) and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) are all reworking their Codes of Ethics in response to “changing conditions, values and ideas.”1 This rare moment of synchronous rethinking about the codified ethics of the profession offers a valuable opportunity to consider how codes of ethics, and the different approaches that professional organizations take in creating them, shape the field’s ability to respond to ethical dilemmas.

On July 27, I will be hosting an online panel discussion for ICOM’s IC-Ethics Committee with representatives from each of those groups, as well as museum ethicist Janet Marstine and Teresa Scheiner, a professor in the Graduate Program in Museology and Heritage at Federal University of Estado do Rio de Janeiro. We will discuss the current state of museum ethics, and consider the ways that the professions’ codes of ethics are created, implemented and used. The session will also seek to unpack the relationships between the different codes and the emergent, complex ethical dilemmas that museum professionals face in the course of their work, and ask how the sector’s ethics practices might need to evolve to meet the needs of the future.

Register Here

I am so excited to host this discussion and speak directly to those with the power to impact the profession’s codes of ethics. I hope you’ll join me and bring your own questions to the conversation!

1 “AAM Code of Ethics for Museums.”

IC-Ethics Conference: The State of Museum Ethics Today

Date: July 27, 2023
Time: 11:00am-12:30pm (ET – New York), 5:00pm-6:30pm (CET – Paris)
Online Conference: Register Here

Speakers: Sally Yerkovich (ICOM Standing Committee on Ethics), Julie Hart (American Alliance of Museums), India Divers (Museums Association – UK), Tereza Scheiner (Federal University of Estado do Rio de Janeiro), Janet Marstine (Museum Ethicist). Moderated by Suse Anderson (IC-Ethics).

The Ethics Reader | March 24, 2023

What a month for museum ethics it has been! The Met has been the focus of several news articles after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published an article linking more than 1,000 antiquities in the Met’s collection to traffickers. The ICIJ has been focused on collecting practices at the Met (and several other museums) for close to two years, following the revelations of the Pandora Papers. Earlier pieces examined the links between the deceased, indicted art trafficker Douglas Latchford and US Museums, including the Denver Art Museum (who, earlier this month announced they were removing the name of Latchford’s associate – and former DAM Board member – Emma Bunker from its Arts of Asia gallery, and returning financial gifts received from the Bunker family in support of its capital campaign).

One quote in the ICIJ investigation into the Met’s practices that caught my attention detailed some concerning historical context:

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1880, long after its counterparts in Paris and London. The museum started out with a purchase of 174 paintings, placing it far from the scale of France’s palatial Louvre’s galleries already holding thousands of works, many inherited from the nation’s colonial exploits.

Even in the 1960s, the largest museum in North America was still playing catch-up. The Met’s leadership aggressively sought major acquisitions and took a casual approach to, and even at times embraced, antiquities smuggling as a mainstay of the museum’s sourcing.

Under its then director, Thomas Hoving, the Met embarked on a buying spree in an effort to build out an antiquities collection that could match rivals in London and Paris. Over the following decades, the institution filled its halls and warehouses with treasures from Greece, Italy, Egypt, India, Cambodia and beyond. “Not a single decade of any civilization that took root on earth is not represented by some worthy piece,” Hoving later wrote of the results of work he had begun. “The Met has it all.”

Woodman, Spencer, Malia Politzer, Delphine Reuter, and Namrata Sharma. “‘The Stuff Was Illegally Dug up’: New York’s Met Museum Sees Reputation Erode over Collection Practices.” The Guardian, March 20, 2023, sec. Culture. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/mar/20/new-york-metropolitan-museum-collection-artifacts-theft.

The quote almost perfectly rhymes with this fascinating interview from July 2022 with Matthew Bogdanos, the head of the New York Antiquities Theft Task Force:

And there’s an emerging market that is, of all the trends, the most troubling: the Gulf states. Objects, mosaics, extraordinary reliefs that used to come the normal route—either to London or to New York—out of the Middle East, out of Iraq and Syria and Turkey and Lebanon and Egypt, are now stopping and disappearing in the UAE and Dubai, Qatar and Kuwait. And that is disturbing. 

When people said, “Oh, wow, it’s so great, the Louvre Abu Dhabi. It’s so amazing that they’re bringing culture to the people.” And my first thought was, no, that’s just another market. You know how the Getty was first founded? In the ‘60s, they had to acquire quickly to catch up because everyone else—well, they wanted to be a major world player. But all these major world museums had been in business hundreds of years. So in order to catch up—I mean, it’s well documented—they had to cut a lot of corners, right? Well, I don’t know why people think the Louvre Abu Dhabi would be any different. They’ve got to catch up. 

There’s only one way to catch up.

Petersen, Anne Helen. “Inside the Mind-Boggling World of the Antiquities Theft Task Force.” Substack newsletter. Culture Study (blog), July 17, 2022. https://annehelen.substack.com/p/inside-the-mind-boggling-world-of.

It’s a troubling take… Meanwhile, reframing the impact of illicit trade of cultural property, Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro has written about their experience of being asked to leave the Met when dancing a prayer to Cambodian antiquities within the galleries. Cheam-Shapiro writes:

Whenever I visit museums around the world that house Khmer antiquities, I pray to the gods and ancestors that inhabit them. Sometimes I simply put my hands together and chant. Other times I move. This is my tradition. It is an essential part of my identity and my relationship to these objects.

…About two minutes into my brief dance, a member of the museum’s security team approached me and stated that I wasn’t allowed to dance there without permission. He also instructed me to put on my shoes. Now, I knew that the museum would be unhappy if it understood what I was praying for. But in that trancelike state, I was unprepared to be interrupted. In fact, in my over 40 years of dancing, no one has ever told me to stop.

Cheam-Shapiro, Sophiline. “Met Museum Kicked Me Out for Praying to My Ancestral Gods.” Hyperallergic, March 21, 2023. http://hyperallergic.com/809442/met-museum-kicked-me-out-for-praying-to-my-ancestral-gods/.

Cheam-Shapiro’s piece reminded me of this recent incident at the Portland Art Museum, in which an Indigenous woman was asked to remove her traditional woven baby carrier while visiting an exhibition of Native American art, since it violated the museum’s “no backpacks” policy, showing the continued tension between museum policies and the needs of different publics to be treated with dignity and respect when accessing cultural collections The museum has since said that it will change its visitor policies regarding baby carriers.

Finally, an update on a couple of pieces that I linked to last month… Lisa Korneichuk’s great piece addressing “misnomer geography” asked why US museums continue to label Ukrainian artists as “Russian”…  An answer of sorts came last week in a NYTimes piece, which described how museums have started to relabel works in their collections to better reflect their Ukrainian roots. And ProPublica continues to publish important pieces addressing the repatriation of Native American remains under NAGPRA, like this one, which looks at the commitments that dozens of museums and universities have made since the series started. For better or worse, it seems that the work of investigative journalists has perhaps become an essential part of museum accountability…

Thanks for joining me for this month’s Ethics Reader. Have you noticed other ethical conversations around the sector this month? I’d love to hear what you’ve been thinking about.

Introducing The Ethics Reader

Well, it’s been a while… my last post was written pre-pandemic, which feels immeasurably long ago. The museum sector has experienced some landmark shifts in that time, including related to repatriation and ethical returns practices, labor equity and unionization, digital practice, and much more. Rather than looking back to where we have been, however, this post marks what is hopefully the first of a set focussed on collecting and contextualizing links and conversations in the field related to questions of ethical practice in museums. Since 2019, I’ve been teaching a course on Museum Ethics and Values, which seeks to understand the practical, political and institutional paradoxes that museums face in trying to work in the service of the public. This course is contemporary in its focus, and seeks to examine emergent ethical dilemmas within the field, many of which are located in news articles, blog posts, and reports from the sector.

Since I am no longer relying on Twitter for all my bookmarking needs, I thought I’d return to blogging to capture links and impressions related to ethical practice in museums. In The Ethics Reader series, I plan to share links to pieces that have captured my attention recently in case they are of interest to you, too. I’d also love to hear what you’re reading and thinking about and I invite you to share your own links and thoughts in the comments.

The Ethics Reader | February 27, 2023

In case you haven’t seen it, repatriation is the focus of a major new investigation from ProPublica, focussed on “The Delayed Return of Native Remains”. The Repatriation Project includes a database of “institutions holding Native American remains and tribes seeking to reclaim them”, a guide for “reporting on institutions that still hold Native American remains“, and an FAQs section addressing the hows and whys of the project. ProPublica’s decision to ask whether the promise of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) had been fulfilled is particularly important, given the recent proposal from the Department of the Interior to revise regulations to improve implementation of NAGPRA. Pair your dive into the subject with this piece from Maya Pontone at Hyperallergic, on the ways that the use of pesticides and preservatives in museums can complicate repatriation work.

Reframing the question of repatriation in the travel section of the New York Times, Charly Wilder draws attention to the increasing recognition that many of the most well-known objects within museums were stolen. Wilder asks us to consider, “what responsibility do we bear as spectators for patronizing institutions that display what critics say are stolen works?” And, as evidence of Russian looting of art from Ukraine’s museums mounts, it is clear that this question is not only relevant in thinking about the objects acquired decades ago, but those entering the markets for cultural property now… Keeping focus on Ukraine as the war passes the one-year mark, Hyperallergic has a great, interesting piece by Lisa Korneichuk addressing “misnomer geography”, which asks why US museums continue to label Ukrainian artists as “Russian”. Korneichuk writes:

Ignoring this issue not only prolongs the status quo but makes it easier for Russia to steal and appropriate more. As I pass by Ekster’s work at the Art Institute, I get a push notification on my phone saying that Russian soldiers looted art museums in the Kherson region. All these stolen heritage properties will end up on display in Russian state galleries and museums, and the looted artists will likely be identified as “Southern Russians.”

…When imperial powers destroy a museum or steal its collection, they strip the opponent side of its material culture and, therefore, of any hard evidence for the legitimacy of its existence. By targeting Ukrainian cultural heritage, Russia obliterates the material representation of Ukrainian identity. And by stealing heritage and appropriating names, Russia denies the oppressed nations any right to independence and self-identification. 

Finally, I wanted to share a piece by Danté Stewart about the role and importance of Black museums that I’ve been sitting with for the last week or so. Although the whole piece is great, this paragraph stands out:

A just country is a grieving country. A country that acknowledges and grapples with its grief, whose people are committed to making the most marginalized visible, to resurrecting the stories that have been buried, is one that has learned to reckon with its sins.

Stewart, Danté. “Opinion | My Kids Need to Know That Black Is Brilliance. So We Go to Museums.” Washington Post, February 12, 2023.

As museums grapple with their own histories, perhaps it is helpful to consider whether a just museum is a grieving museum, acknowledging and grappling with its grief and learning to reckon with its sins…

I’d love to hear from you. What are the ethical dilemmas facing museums that you’re thinking about these days?

Reflections on teaching museum digital practice in 2019

When I was early in my teaching career at GWU, I had a conversation with Cait Reizman  about her belief that students need to be able to leave a museum studies program with something tangible that they could share with future employers. The comment stayed with me, and since that time I’ve thought about how best to realise that aim. I initially asked students to blog, since public writing had been so beneficial to my own career. But recently, I’ve become less comfortable with requiring students take on the risk of public writing without the benefit of prior review. This fall, I tackled the problem differently.

Inspired by the Humanizing the Digital: Unproceedings from the MCN 2018 Conference book project, which my co-editors and I produced in less than four months after the MCN conference last year, my students in Museums and Digital Technology took on an ambitious project. Together, we created a digital publication about the state of digital practice in museums in 2019. Each student was responsible for creating one 3,500-4,000-word piece of writing that dives deeply into a specific research area related to the overall topic of museums and digital technology. Student projects could synthesize current readings and practice around a broad area, or dive deeper into a single technology or case study related to the theme of digital practice and its impact on the museum. Students would then work with a small group of peer reviewers to develop their ideas and writing alongside regular feedback from me. The finished publication is built on Quire, the open source multiformat publishing platform created by the Getty. Each student was responsible for defining and researching their topic and writing their paper, then I, working closely with Greg Albers, Digital Publication Manager at the Getty, was responsible for compiling the final book.

The intent was that that students would gain a broad overview into the issues related to technology in museums today via weekly lectures and discussions; a deep engagement with a topic of personal or professional interest through a research project; experience in a collaborative creative environment through the peer review process; and practical skills in Markdown language. At the end of the semester, each student would have a published piece to share with peers, colleagues and friends. From my perspective, this has been a hugely successful approach to teaching on museum digital practice. As the semester matured, I found students bringing their own research into class discussions with depth and maturity. Additionally, multiple students reached out to museum professionals from around the sector to find out more about specific projects they were working on, growing their insights beyond those that I could provide and enabling professional networking.

I am so proud of what my students have produced in what was ultimately a ten-week period from initial proposal through to publication. Their essays are thoughtful and interesting, with varied topics such as empathy and technology in Holocaust museums, shifting paradigms in visitor participation (which focusses on user-generated content), social media and crisis communications, social media collecting practices in museums, collections management policies and procedures for Time-Based Media and many more.  The flexibility of Quire’s format enabled experimentation in writing style, form and content. Students embedded gifs, Sketchfab mockups and JSON files in their papers. Some essays were personal and others took a more formal tone. 

Of course, there are some challenges with a project like this. Since this project was an experiment in the works, we were figuring out some of it as we went, so there are some inconsistencies with formatting and style. This is exacerbated by the short turnaround time from when students handed in their completed essays to our final publishing date. The tight turnarounds were also challenging for students who get sick or need to miss a deadline for some other external reason. There is, for instance, one essay still to be added to the book, which will now happen after launch. Beyond this, there are naturally gaps in my knowledge in certain areas, so there may be areas of critique that I missed or could better have supported. One possible area for future development of this approach is to seek volunteer peer-reviewers from around the sector who might be able to work with students on their essays, although that introduces other kinds of contingencies to take into account.

This was the most ambitious project I’ve taken on as a professor, and it took significantly more investment than other kinds of teaching, because I needed to be supervisor and editor to each student, as well as running weekly classes. I also needed to learn how to use Quire and become somewhat familiar with Github. But I think the results have been absolutely worth it. My long-term hope is to repeat this project each time I teach this course moving forward, so that we build up an archive of public student research over time, which can act as a marker about their ongoing and specific concerns and interest in the sector.

Thank you to Greg Albers for his generous work helping us bring this publication to life, and to each of my students for diving in wholeheartedly. If you are interested in reading the syllabus for this course in more detail or finding out about this project, get in contact with me and I’ll send it your way.

Because they are hard… Reflections on #MCN2019

Last week, around 500 museum digital practitioners were thrown together in a resort in San Diego for MCN 2019. This was my eighth MCN, and it was the first one since I first attended in 2011 that I had absolutely no hand in shaping. When I first went to MCN, I was both a scholarship recipient and a member of the program committee. By 2015, I was a program co-chair. In 2016, I added to my co-chair responsibilities and joined the board and the executive committee, before becoming MCN President at the end of the following year. It is no exaggeration to say that I have been intimately involved with the conference and MCN more broadly as long as I have been in the museum tech community, so it was with great joy that I was able to attend the conference as an attendee rather than a creator. I had a lovely time, and wanted to share some reflections of that experience. It’s a while since I’ve fired off the ol’ blog for some post-conference discussion, so forgive me if I’m a little rusty.

Following along from a distance via the Twitter conversations, Seb Chan commented in his newsletter (which you should subscribe to) that the conference seemed exhausting, “like a ‘Museum Support Network’ for workers struggling to keep their heads above water.” Rachel Ropiek has also noted that in written years, the “conference tone also shifted — especially in the last two years — away from all that joy toward a desperation-tinged need to support each other through difficult times.” Dana Allen-Griel put it this way…

Part of this shifting experience of the conference might be because, as Jeremy suggested, MCN seems to be torn between its identities as a tech conference (look! shiny new thing!) and “a social justice oriented conference that primarily examines museums through the lens of tech.” I think he’s giving voice to a really interesting tension. But it’s a tension that, for the first time in a while, I found hugely productive.

For me, MCN2019 was filled with people interrogating, reframing and reexamining their work and the practices of their peers within the sector in light of changing understanding about the technological, political and cultural environment. There were more questions raised than solutions offered, which might have been uncomfortable for some. However, I left MCN more optimistic than I was when I arrived, because it felt like the scale and complexity of the challenges we’re facing, as individuals and institutions, as a country and even globally, were being taken seriously, without slipping to the glib, superficial or easy response. The deep, ongoing engagement with difficult conversations, whether about machine learning, white supremacy culture and its manifestations, the toxic hell-hole that social media has become and what that means for our communities and our staff, or about data governance, ethics and privacy, suggests that our sector is taking seriously both the daily concerns of the job and our long-term, collective responsibilities to our many communities and publics. As Nik Honeysett reminded us, “We do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Because they are hard.

Engaging with these kinds of conversations and speaking out comes at a cost (particularly for people of colour and other marginalised people who bear the burden of driving so much change in our institutions). But multiple times, I witnessed people who were clearly grappling with challenging topics speak about them. For instance, I was hugely moved in Kate Haley Goldman‘s session on How Human-Centered Design Fails Museums, in which she argued that the processes that HCD uses are fundamentally reductionist and othering, minimising the complexity of users in ways that are deeply concerning. She asked us to consider, “What are the unintended downstream effects of our work? How and where are we retraumatising people?” Kate was clearly grappling both with her own understanding of complex problems and what it might mean to question the strategies and approaches that the sector has adopted. But she was speaking out even when it was uncomfortable. And I think that, for me, was part of the point. The conversations about our complicity in algorithmic discrimination and surveillance capitalism and what we might do about it felt like an enormous leap from conversations I had only a few years ago.

Of course, it’s not just the conference that has evolved. I have changed over those years, too (haven’t we all?! America often feels like a year passes in each week). That’s one reason why Seema’s love letter to her conference friends, in which she spoke about the importance of “normalizing real emotions”, resonated with me. This year in the classroom, I have regularly tried to show my emotions to demonstrate to my students that, like them, I am a whole person for whom teaching is merely one aspect of my job (also recognising that discomfort with emotions or feelings is a characteristic of white supremacy culture). Similarly, at MCN this year, I ended up crying or on the verge of tears at least four or five times. Being emotionally open and experiencing those emotions even when it meant crying in a hallway rather than trying to keep it all together might have contributed to the way I felt in leaving San Diego.

As MCN wrapped up, Aaron Cope forward me a link to a Tweet from Deb Chachra, in which she wrote about how she was recently asked, “how I stay optimistic when I am spending my days thinking about infrastructure (and thus climate change, resilience, social justice , etc.).”

And maybe that’s what it felt like, like we were all working as if we lived in the early days of a better nation (and a better museum sector) or a distributed, slow-motion apocalypse.

A huge thank you and congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to put this conference together – particularly Andrea, Andrea and Eric.

VOX POPS: Crowdsourcing Museum Definition perspectives for Museopunks

As you probably know, the International Council of Museums recently proposed a new definition for museums. Although the vote on the definition was postponed, the conversations that it sparked have been valuable and provocative. On the next episode of Museopunks, we wanted to try to unpack more nuance and perspectives than we can do with any single interview, so we’re crowdsourcing some responses to the following prompts or questions.

  • Do we need a new international definition of museums?
  • How might a new definition affect the sector and/or your work within it?
  • Is this discussion important within your national setting?
  • Has the conversation changed anything for you, or is this discussion a distraction?
  • Was this the right definition?
  • What is a museum? What is your vision for museums?
  • What else should we be thinking about in this conversation?

If you want to contribute, please send me a short (1min-5min) audio recording of your perspectives. In your recording, please identify yourself as you’d like to be represented on the show, as well as noting your country and if you’re an ICOM member.

We’re doing this as a bit of a sprint, so it would be amazing if you could send me your reply by Sunday this week (October 6).

We’ll be selecting a number of responses to go on the episode, but may also release an additional track online featuring other responses if we receive too many to feature on the show. We’d love to hear from people in different parts of the world too, so if you’re somewhere that we don’t always feature via our guests, get in touch!

Teaching a new course on museum ethics

This semester, I’m teaching a new course on Museum Ethics and Values. Early in the development of this course, I reached out via Twitter for thoughts about the kind of topics the course should address. These discussions have informed the final approach, so I wanted to share and revisit them. (I didn’t include every response, but here is a sense of the range and scope…)

Museum Neutrality & Systems of Oppression

 

All about that money (and governance)

Employment & Wage Equity

How to act work with and through ethical dilemmas (institutionally or personally)

Other interesting questions

The final course focuses primarily on contemporary cases and discussions to consider the institutional context of ethics, with the intent of helping my students understand the state of the field today. The top-line subjects we’re discussing include:

  • What is Ethics?
  • Codes of Ethics and Professional Standards
  • Museums, Money and Power
  • Ethical Curatorial Practices
  • Deaccessioning
  • Repatriation, Restitution and Human Remains
  • Issues in Ethical Conservation
  • Decolonization, Indigenization and Legacies of Colonialism
  • Working with Communities
  • Museum Neutrality + Social Justice
  • Environmental Sustainability
  • (Some) Issues Related to Digital Practice
  • Labor Issues
  • How to negotiate ethical issues as an emerging professional

Discussions about diversity are incorporated throughout, as are conversations about power (and who has it, who doesn’t). Being the first iteration of the course, I’m sure there are gaps and areas of practice that are missing or could be more effectively discussed, but after week three of class, this feels like a good starting place. It’s worth noting that this is now a core course for all students studying Museum Studies at GW, which they will take in their first year, so that considerations about ethics and ethical practice underpin the program.

Thank you my colleagues at GW, Gregory Stevens at the Institute of Museum Ethics, Ellie Miles, Jennifer Kingsley and everyone who weighed in on the initial Tweet for your thoughts. In anyone is interested in reading the syllabus in more detail, get in contact with me and I’ll send it your way.

a new punk.

A couple of weeks ago, I put out a call for a collaborator, co-host and co-producer for Museopunks, the podcast for the progressive museum. I was overwhelmed by how many people reached out to find out more and put themselves forward. I had in-person or phone calls with nine potential collaborators, who ranged from people I knew very well to strangers with impressive or intriguing backgrounds within the sector.

Through those discussions, a few things became clear:

  • Museopunks has become more than a podcast for me. It is how my professional identity expresses itself. It is my professional practice. The potential collaborators who stood out where the ones who understood that innately.
  • Museopunks is vehicle for discussing boundary-pushing work in museums with an intersectional approach and nuanced focus. But because Museopunks tackles wide-ranging topics, the best collaborator was not necessarily someone with deep knowledge around a single aspect of progressive museum practice, but broad curiosity about museums, their place in the world, and their institutional practices.
  • Since my collaborator will help shape the show, I wanted someone who was aware of the important issues in the sector and who has vision for ways that we can approach them in a “museopunks” way. I had one conversation with a potential collaborator who had great vision, but whose approach to storytelling was so different from my own that it felt like we were talking about a different show. Although collaboration will change the show by necessity, it was critical that my collaborator shared my vision of the work itself.

I’m thrilled to announce that I have, indeed, found a new Punk to join the show: Ed Rodley, Director of Integrated Media at the Peabody Essex Museum. Ed and I have worked together on a number of project over the years, including CODE|WORDS, Humanizing the Digital and the MCN2015 Conference. He is one of the smartest museum thinkers I know, and I never stop learning from him. As a bonus, we just finished working on a Museopunks episode together (recorded before I started looking for a collaborator, but probably part of the inspiration for doing so).

Although I’ve (perhaps unsurprisingly) ended up with a collaborator whom I know well, and have worked with for years, this process was a wonderful, generative one and has encouraged me to think more creatively about other ways that Museopunks might be able to explore other forms of collaboration, such as having regular guests and correspondents-from-the-field. While I do not know exactly what form that will take, the next few months will include some behind-the-scenes discussion, exploration and experimentation, as we look at the longer term impact of these discussions. I hope that many of the people I connected with in the last few weeks may be part of the future of the show.

Thank you to everyone who reached out, or who forwarded my post to friends and colleagues with recommendations for connection. It was wonderful to get better acquainted with listeners, colleagues from the sector, and potential collaborators. We have a sector filled with brilliant people, y’all. 

And Ed… welcome to the show!