On the importance of possibility and hope in Museum Studies
Dr. Suse Anderson
Introduction
For the past three years, I have been teaching a course on Museum Ethics and Values in the Museum Studies program at The George Washington University. Grounded in contemporary examples, the course seeks to unpack practical, political, and institutional paradoxes that museums face in trying to work in the service of the public. At times, the content can be upsetting to students, particularly when examining questions around equity (including labor equity), collecting and exhibiting objects of trauma, and the limited success that museums have had in diversifying. In Fall 2021, when teaching a group of students dealing with the compounded traumas of COVID-19, reckoning with racial violence and anti-Blackness, and deep political polarization, I realized that my syllabus had neglected some crucial elements, namely radical joy, hope, and counter-narratives that answer back to power and offer alternate forms of practice. In this essay, I will consider the important role of possibility in museum studies today, both as a form of care for students living through an ongoing set of collective traumatic experiences, and to create the conditions for imagining alternate futures.
Before moving further into this piece, it is helpful to speak briefly of my position as author. I am a cis-gendered white Australian woman, now living in Baltimore, Maryland. I first moved to America in 2014 to work at The Baltimore Museum of Art, when my focus was on the transformative potential of digital technologies on museum practice. However, my concerns shifted quickly when working in an institution that seemed to largely serve a white audience, despite its location in a primarily Black city. My understanding of museums became further complicated as I grew more aware of the precarity and vulnerability of so many in a country with limited social safety nets, and the ways that these vulnerabilities were inextricably tied to racism and historic oppressions. Following the critical conversations related to racism and anti-Blackness, police brutality and the culpability of museums and museum workers of the last decade, such as those held by Adrianne Russell and Aleia Brown around #MuseumsRespondToFerguson, I began to more critically engage with ideas around racial, social and economic justice, trying to simultaneously face my complicity and rethink the ways that I approached my practice (and life). Questions about my normative values and assumed ways of doing things continued as I moved into academia in 2016, and can now be felt in the way I approach pedagogy. This essay marks some of my current work and thinking on that journey.
Situating Museum Ethics and Values
In Fall 2019, following an examination of its curriculum, program, and intended outcomes, the Museum Studies program at the George Washington University enacted a series of changes intended to ensure that the program was equipping students with both the practical skills they need to enter the profession, and the knowledge and critical thinking skills that would help them plan for, and adapt to, a changing sector. The new program structure was simultaneously more tailorable to individual student needs and added necessary structure and improved skillsets in areas of concentration and focus. It was also significantly less expensive, important for those who are entering a sector which systemically undercompensates.
In addition to these broad curriculum changes was the introduction of a compulsory course on Museum Ethics and Values, taught to all students in their first year. The decision to center ethics within the program responded to feedback we’d had from contract faculty, alumni, and peers within the museum sector about the increasing need to ensure that emerging professionals had a strong grasp on the ethical dilemmas confronting the field. It also offered a return to earlier days of the GWU program under the direction of Emeritus Professor Marie C. Malaro, a former lawyer and author of pioneering work on collections law and ethics prior to her death in 2018. Unlike Emeritus Professor Malaro, however, I am not a lawyer. My approach to teaching ethics focuses on highlighting and examining contemporary ethical dilemmas confronting the field, with the intention of preparing students to enter into the field conversant in the debates and discussions animating the sector at large. Although students become familiar with current professional standards and codes of ethics, the course engages them in dialogue about all parts of the museum, including governance and funding, questions related to collecting and preservation of objects, education and serving the public, exhibiting culture, and much more, with the aim of making visible many of the structures and pressures that shape today’s museum work.
Format and Structure
In both content and structure, Museum Ethics and Values looks to the work of museum ethicist, Janet Marstine. Informed by feminist theory, Marstine (2011) understands museum ethics as contingent in nature, “deeply engaged with the world around it… adaptive and improvisational” (p. #8). Within this framing, ethics exists as a discourse and social practice, an opportunity for growth that emphasizes self-reflexivity. The core tenets of Marstine’s new museum ethics are social responsibility, radical transparency, and shared guardianship of heritage. Similarly, the Museum Ethics and Values classroom is highly dialogic, using discourse as a means through which to seek understanding about the practical, political, and institutional paradoxes that museums face in trying to work in the service of the public. With a mind to self-reflexivity, assignments include reflection papers about students’ values and their learning in the class. These are combined with analytical research that considers a core ethical dilemma of the student’s choosing, as well as collaborative assignments, such as shared note-taking. Using discourse ethics in the classroom also follows the approach of Judith Chelius Stark (2011), who has proposed that discourse ethics is a method of problem solving particularly pertinent to the museum field, with its emphasis on collaboration. She draws upon the work of Seyla Benhabib and Hannah Arendt to describe the creation of associational meeting places, wherein “all participants cultivate an “enlarged mentality” in which all learn how to reason, understand and appreciate the standpoint of other participants” (Chelius Stark, 2011, p. 35).
Psychological Safety in the Classroom
When I started teaching in 2016, psychological safety was not something I considered. Perhaps imagining the classroom as a naturally-safe learning environment, I did not consider the deliberate steps I might need to take to ensure that students felt comfortable participating. However, because Museum Ethics and Values includes often-challenging content, creating a safe and supportive environment is a deliberate act. This starts in the first or second class by creating a shared set of protocols for behavior that all students agree to abide by. These protocols frequently include practical suggestions for controlling the flow of discussion, such as hand signals to show interest in speaking, but can also touch on less obvious considerations. For instance, every semester, I emphasize that students have agency in how they participate in the class, which means they can leave at any time, for any reason without needing to explain their movements. In Spring 2022, I have started to borrow a question from Andrew Palamara, Ronna Tulgan Ostheimer, Stephen Legari, Emily Wiskera, and Laura Evans (2020), which asks, “What do you all need from each other to be honest and vulnerable in this conversation?”. The responses change for each group of students, and while I offer some suggestions on helpful protocols based on past teaching experiences, it is essential that the protocols are self-defined by the students and offer some autonomy within the group. Stark (2011) describes how, in discourse ethics, there must be a rational consensus reached in order to achieve a group norm, wherein “the interests of those actually affected by the decision are morally relevant and that moral rightness depends on the real consensus of participants in the discussions” (p. 34). By jointly creating the protocols for respectful conversation, we seek real agreement about how to treat one another.
That said, teaching ethics in this way necessarily includes challenging material and the conversations often cover difficult territory, inviting further engagement with the concept of psychological safety and how to account for the experiences students might have beyond the classroom. The class draws on recent articles about museums and their ethical challenges, tracking events such as the recent protests over funding at the Whitney Museum of Art or the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes, situated alongside more theoretical perspectives and formal codes of ethics. We consider what it means to collect and exhibit material related to trauma. We ask how the field is responding to calls for decolonization and how the histories of colonization continue to inform present practice. We look at museum salaries, labor equity, and unionization movements within the field. Early in the semester, I ask the students to hold onto complexity and even ambivalence, rather than rushing to easy answers, which can be uncomfortable for many.
Such feelings of discomfort have been magnified recently by other events external to, but still influential on, the museum field. At a minimum, most or all students are now dealing with more than two years of unprocessed grief and trauma as a result of the COVID pandemic. For many, that buttresses emotional responses to the recent reckonings with racial injustice and anti-Blackness in this country, deep political polarization, and stress related to the climate crisis. For some students, these traumas have compounded other traumatic experiences, including childhood traumas, traumas related to death and other forms of loss, or those associated with racism, ableism, patriarchy, capitalism, and more. Additionally, as Dina Bailey (2020) notes, “Black people in the U.S. are experiencing complex trauma due to the added stress of the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks in addition to many others; and the retraumatization caused by the intensity of conversation and actions related to these deaths”(para. #10). It has become impossible to imagine students unaffected by traumatic circumstances by the time they get to the classroom.
While these traumas are often invisible, they can directly impact students and their ability to learn. Recently, several museum professionals have drawn attention to the importance of trauma awareness and trauma-informed responses within museum practice (Armstrong, 2020; Armstrong et al., 2021; Bailey, 2020; DeLosSantos et al., 2021; Palamara et al., 2020). In a similar way, I am trying to incorporate trauma-informed pedagogy into the classroom. Principles in trauma-informed teaching and learning include being respectful of the need for safety; building trust and transparency through clear, consistent expectations and practice; offering resources for support and connection; enabling collaboration and power-sharing in decision-making; empowering choice and agency; social justice, or recognizing and responding to privilege and oppression; and creating resilience, growth and change through optimistic feedback (Carello, n.d.).
Creating Resilience, Growth and Change
It is the last of these — creating resilience, growth and change — that I unexpectedly found wanting in my approach to this course during Fall 2021. Perhaps it was my own experiences of traumatic events throughout the pandemic, or that I had spent too much time on museum Twitter (which has been fairly pessimistic of late), but part way through the semester, I realized that the syllabus was missing the optimistic examples of institutions that are doing great and interesting work. This realization came in response to discussions in a different course, Museum History and Theory. Early in the semester, Grace Bautista, a first-year student in the Public Engagement track of the Museum Studies program, commented about how impactful she’d found Amy Lonetree’s (2012) work about decolonization, since it provided a counter-narrative to stories told from the voice of the oppressor. This observation stuck with me. I started to notice how many of the readings in Museum Ethics and Values put museum’s oppressive and negative behaviors on display, rather than dismantling them and offering alternative narratives, actionsreminiscent of what Melanie A. Adams (2017) describes in her article on how museums can use Critical Race Theory to deconstruct systems of bias.
Since its first iteration, Museum Ethics and Values had drawn on practices of institutional critique to consider the power relationships and social practices that influence museums. Yet, institutional critique is perhaps most powerful when it opens up space for radical reimagining of an institution– when the act of critical questioning is followed by consideration of alternate futures and counter-narratives. The potency of that imagining is even stronger when it asks the participant to imagine how they might make and be part of such change. In a piece contemplating the evolution of institutional critique, Andrea Fraser (2005) writes:
Every time we speak of the “institution” as other than “us,” we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions. We avoid responsibility for, or action against, the everyday complicities, compromises, and censorship — above all, self-censorship — which are driven by our own interests in the field and the benefits we derive from it. It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art. It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalized, embodied, and performed by individuals, these are the questions that institutional critique demands we ask, above all, of ourselves. (para. #25)
While critical questioning would remain at the heart of the course, I immediately altered some of the readings for future weeks to put greater emphasis on joy, hope, and change in the sector, looking for models of inspiration as well as case studies where ethical dilemmas were apparent.
Assessments and ungrading
Since institutional critique informs Museum Ethics and Values, I have also begun to consider ways that we can put its ideas into practice within the classroom. One space is grading. For several years, assignments in Museum Ethics and Values have felt more like a conversation between each student and myself. The major assignment is a 4,000-word paper that identifies and analyzes a current or emerging case or situation related to museum ethics. Writing the paper is scaffolded across the semester, with students first presenting an “idea statement” and basic bibliography, a “working draft” of at least four pages, and a “final draft” of a paper nearing completion before handing in their final paper. At each step, students receive feedback about ideas, writing, structure, and possible sources that might support their work. Since the course started in 2019, several students have used the work developed in this class as the basis for publications, PhD program applications, and writing awards within the program.
In the Spring 2022 iteration of the course, I have moved to an “ungrading” model for assessment, which emphasizes feedback over grades. In addition to written feedback about their papers, students participate in regular check-ins about their progress. I ask them to identify where they are struggling and how I can help. Although each section of the course is ungraded, students do receive a final grade, which is collaboratively determined. Students will reflexively self-assess their efforts in the class, including their commitment to the work itself and their learning, and we will use that as a basis for grading. Although not appropriate for every course, ungrading is, as Jesse Stomell (2017) describes, a practice that emphasizes “agency, dialogue, self-actualization, and social justice” (para. #2). It seeks to unsettle “grading” as a systemic practice by raising questions about the benefits of standardized grading when learning is not a standardized experience. Given the emphasis on self-reflexivity and intention to create an environment that is psychologically safe and that encourages intellectual risk-taking, ungrading removes the emphasis on ranking and competition, and asks each student to engage with the issues that are most meaningful to their own career and learning. Placing the emphasis on feedback and nurturing student ideas is intended to further support students to take intellectual risks and develop their own understanding of the issues at stake, without focusing on the seeming arbitrariness of final grades. This approach aligns with a move towards trauma-informed teaching and learning because, as Sean Michael Morris (2021) notes, “ungrading is always necessarily a part of a pedagogy of care” (para. #29).
Final Thoughts
The most recent iteration of Museum Ethics and Values does not, on the surface, look significantly different from prior versions. We still cover many of the same topics and even include several of the same readings. However, there are some significant structural differences that start to address these gaps. The first is the inclusion of more readings that offer counter-narratives and hope, particularly in the latter half of the semester, as a way of creating both visions for change and showing ways that such change can manifest. We read about equitable human resource practices, such as those recently taken by the Museum of Us, and explore the Pitt Rivers’ commitment to change and their associated actions. To further support my students, I have invited lawyers from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs to speak with the students about their rights at work, to better prepare them for self-advocacy as they move forward in their careers. While I cannot fully speak to the effectiveness of these changes yet, reflective statements, such as those below, from students in Fall 2021 suggests that the course is moving in the right direction (student quotes reproduced with permission).
“Despite my lingering fears over my future in the industry and our ability to implement transformative change, our conversations did make me hopeful. I would say my biggest shift from the beginning of the semester and my personal values statement is not only an increase in hopefulness, but a greater awareness of the tools needed to turn our hopefulness into change. I don’t know if everything is possible, but I must remind myself to continue asking, “why not?” and “why not me (or us)?” Why not now?” – Grace Bautista (she/her), Emerging museum professional
“While this course has provided a wonderful toolkit for addressing ethical quandaries that I will encounter during my career, my largest takeaway from this course has been to understand the importance of creating my own space when I encounter trauma in my work. I acknowledge the importance of museums in documenting human tragedy, often to document and avoid this tragedy occurring again in the future, but I also acknowledge my needs as a museum professional. In a profession that demands so much its workers, both in time and energy, I need to give myself the grace to step back and take time to process working with objects that represent traumatic histories, and I need to create support networks that allow my fellow museum professionals to find the space they need in their day-to-day work.” – Emma Cieslik (she/her), emerging museum professional
“As I enter the field, taking stances on these issues will require me to continue to learn, grow, think, and be challenged. To be blunt, this is a terrifying proposition for an early career professional. The thought of being wrong can easily steer people into taking the safest path, maintaining the status quo, and not “rocking the boat.” However, truly seeking to better the field requires this type of risk. Engaging with these questions in the classroom is a necessary first step. Getting acquainted with the issues, stakes, and problems in the field is an incredibly helpful foundation to build off. Ultimately what I’ll take away from the course is that these questions are not going away and that I have a role in either perpetuating systems of power in the museum field or shifting it towards a more just and equitable future. Given the large themes that we’ve grappled with over the semester, this can seem like an anti-climactic conclusion. However, the thought of having agency in these decisions was a distant thought at the beginning of these discussions with my peers. Now, this agency serves as the guiding light that will allow me to forge a path through the shades of gray that obscures the path forward for both myself and museums as a whole.” – Sam Waltman (He/Him)
Being responsible and responsive to my students in an era of collective, complex trauma requires new approaches to teaching, including changes to course content and models of assessment. However, I should note that my resolve to include radical joy, hope, and possibility alongside critique is not merely essential for my students; it’s also important for me. After the events of recent years, I also need optimism about the future of the field. It turns out, however, that I most find it in the classroom. My students in the GW Museum Studies program today are sensitive, empathetic, and motivated by social justice work. They are thoughtful, and willing to hold onto complexity rather than rush to the easy or comfortable answer. It is a joy to be in discourse with them and to learn alongside them, and I look forward to seeing how the field will change in coming years in response to their considered and considerate, ethical approaches to museum practice, which have inevitably been shaped by this moment and its deep complexities.
Dr. Suse Anderson
Dr. Anderson is Assistant Professor, Museum Studies at The George Washington University, and host of Museopunks–the podcast for the progressive museum. For more than a decade, her work and research has focused on the intersection of ethics, technology and culture, and particularly the impact of digital technologies on the museum. In 2020, Anderson and co-author, Dr Keir Winesmith, released The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations, which explores the role of digital technology in contemporary art museum practice within Europe, the USA, and Australasia through a series of moderated conversations. She holds a PhD (Creative Arts) and a BFA (Hons), both from The University of Newcastle, Australia, and a BArts from Charles Sturt University, Australia.
Since moving to Baltimore from Australia in 2014, Anderson has fallen in love with the city she now calls home. You should visit her there sometime, or connect with her on Twitter.
References
Adams, M. A. (2017). Deconstructing Systems of Bias in the Museum Field Using Critical Race Theory. Journal of Museum Education, 42(3), 290–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2017.1339172
Armstrong, J. (2020, August 3). Museums Must Become More Trauma Informed. Art Museum Teaching. https://artmuseumteaching.com/2020/08/03/museums-must-become-more-trauma-informed/
Armstrong, J., Evans, L., Legari, S., Ostheimer, R. T., Palamara, A., & Wiskera, E. (2021). Weaving Trauma Awareness into Museum Education. Https://Doi.Org/10.1080/10598650.2021.1981045, 46(4), 454–466. https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2021.1981045
Bailey, D. (2020, September 11). We Can’t Go Back to Normal: Responding to Trauma Within the Museum Field. Viewfinder: Reflecting on Museum Education. https://medium.com/viewfinder-reflecting-on-museum-education/we-cant-go-back-to-normal-responding-to-trauma-within-the-museum-field-3f924152850e
Carello, J. (n.d.). Trauma-Informed Teaching & Learning Principles.
Chelius Stark, J. (2011). The art of ethics: Theories and applications to museum practice. In J. Marstine (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First Century Museum (First, pp. 26–40). Routledge.
DeLosSantos, J., Pierce, K., Lee, K. J., & Martínez, G. (2021, April 22). Holding Space: A Roundtable Conversation on Trauma and Teaching in the Museum — Art Journal Open. Art Journal Open. http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=15407
Fraser, A. (2005, September). From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique. Artforum International. https://www.artforum.com/print/200507/from-the-critique-of-institutions-to-an-institution-of-critique-9407
Lonetree, A. (2012). Decolonizing museums : representing native America in national and tribal museums (First). University of North Carolina Press.
Marstine, J. (2011). The contingent nature of the new museum ethics. In Routledge companion to museum ethics : redefining ethics for the twenty-first century museum (1st ed.). Routledge.
Morris, S. M. (2021, June 9). When We Talk about Grades, We Are Talking about People. Sean Michael Morris. https://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/when-we-talk-about-grading-we-are-talking-about-people/
Palamara, A., Ostheimer, R. T., Legari, S., Wiskera, E., & Evans. (2020, June 29). Trauma-Aware Art Museum Education: Principles & Practices. Art Museum Teaching. https://artmuseumteaching.com/2020/06/29/trauma-aware-art-museum-education-principles-practices/
Stommel, J. (2017, October 26). Why I Don’t Grade. Jesse Stomme (Blog). https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/
