Lost Jobs, Found Voices: A Documentary Theatre Project of Shared Vulnerability
Alli Hartley-Kong, Rachel Ropeik, and Mimosa Shah
White supremacy culture and misplaced vocational awe are on blatant display in our GLAMs, and they cannot be addressed with largely empty statements of support while employees are treated so disposably in favor of collections. And as much as it feels easy to find scapegoats (in Directors’ offices, HR departments, or other areas) on which to focus our frustrations, the deeper truth is that the fundamental systems in which we work have these cultural values baked into their foundational roots.
Creating space and connecting with fellow GLAM workers in this time of upheaval has strengthened the position that we learn and heal together in community; that nothing worth doing is done entirely alone. To foster that, we are using documentary theatre as a format to address the many structural issues that isolate us in our workplaces. In solidarity with the alternative (sometimes ephemeral) collectives we have seen sprout up in the last few years, we hope that this project offers a model for creative catharsis in a deeply troubling, confusing time. Beyond creative catharsis, we also look ahead to how museum leaders and museum studies’ programs will incorporate these experiences of professional loss into their strategic planning and curricula, and what generative strategies future museum educators might propose in the coming years. We propose that our work can be a primary source text for the radical changes happening in our field and relationship to work.
Act I: A Collective Idea is Born
“I wish we had talked more as a field, and honestly shared the pain we were feeling. Museum Workers Speak did more than any established organization, and that’s because they were grassroots.”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States in March of 2020, those of us following conversations in the museum and cultural field noticed two dichotomous trends. Temporary closures saw many vulnerable frontline staff furloughed without pay or laid off. Eventually, as the pandemic raged on, cuts across institutions deepened even further. At the same time, remaining staff found their duties changing as they absorbed other people’s jobs, pivoting their programs and services to fit a telework and hybrid world, all while facing personal shifts in lives wrought by the pandemic.
Yet, even as this crisis in cultural institutions continued to unfold, some of us still found ourselves at conferences discussing pre-2020 struggles. As culture workers’ labor realities were becoming increasingly precarious and untenable, it was hard to hear colleagues focusing instead on choosing the best collections management system and cheering “resiliency.” It felt like Nero’s proverbial fiddling while Rome was on fire.
Mimosa and Rachel have collaborated on several previous iterations of experiential programs. They both resigned from jobs in the GLAM sector (Mimosa from a library, Rachel from a museum) when their work situations either no longer supported healthy, balanced lives or had a paucity of growth opportunities.
Alli is a writer who found a new voice after being laid off during the pandemic. As she began thinking about formulating a creative work about living through the pandemic as a museum worker, the idea of writing about collective experiences emerged. And when it came to the genre of that writing, she immediately thought of documentary theatre.
Alli’s initial Tweet about the seed of this project, which resulted in a DM conversation between the three co-authors of this project
Documentary theatre, or verbatim theatre, is a type of theatre that uses real words and documents. Sometimes there are composite characters, sometimes it’s based on famous people, sometimes it’s based on interviews, but the one criterion is that it takes source materials and stitches them together.
Act II: Our Process
“I’m eager for this project. I’m sure there are a lot of parallels of what I’m saying and other people are saying, but I would love to hear other people’s takeaways and maybe they’re not as cynical as mine. We’re still dealing with the psychological trauma. This is a good opportunity for people to have closure. Well, closure-ish.”
Asking our colleagues throughout the sector to share their stories was the first step. We developed a ‘pitch’ for what we were doing and why we needed to address concerns around how these real stories from real people were being used. We wanted to ensure this was not a self-promotion project, nor that our colleagues who already gave so much of themselves to their institutions would feel like we were asking them to re-perform their trauma for us.
In an era of writers increasingly using their artistic license in ways that could be downright exploitative, we prioritized an ethics of care (no Bad Art Friends here). As theorized by Virginia Held (2007), we worked to honor the relations in which a person is caring for both oneself and for others at once. These are acts that, when seen collectively, comprise a critique of the self-sufficient individualism so often celebrated in our capitalist society.
We shared our approach transparently at every step of the way on our social media channels and in public documents for anyone considering participation. In seeking stories of professional loss, we intentionally avoided limiting definitions. Our definition of professional loss was if you thought you had been through it, we were interested in hearing your story. Each of the three main collaborators on this project has had their own experience of professional loss, and we were intentional to take care of each other as well as our friends and colleagues who shared their stories. We spoke to people who were laid off, who resigned, who retired, who took planned severance packages. We spoke to people whose jobs are the same on paper, but radically different in reality as they have been required to absorb former colleagues’ responsibilities, as well as people who lost coworkers to layoffs and resignations.
Acting in the roles of both witness and supporter, we developed a template of interview questions, acknowledging that these initial prompts were merely guidelines for how we would be present during these conversations. We shared the questions in advance, with participants always able to decline a question. Individuals who signed up through an online form received an email from us explaining how each session would take place (with options to either use Zoom with audio only versus both audio and video). Making participants feel comfortable sharing their story with us was of special importance. We recognized the privilege we held in making space for connection and support during a difficult time. More importantly, each of us knew from personal experience the challenges of professional loss and the strategies needed to gauge whether a situation was psychologically safe or not for one to be open.
To create that psychological safety, we allowed for a variety of ways to bridge the divide between participant and interviewer. For many conversations, two of us were present to conduct the interview, troubleshoot any technical glitches, and keep a record of what was being shared. Whether or not participants wanted to be on camera, honoring their desires and vulnerability meant being fully present on a call in ways that contradicted the hyperaware, multi-tasking lives we lead. Listening in earnest to our participants also meant that we let pauses and silence be a way to accompany us, providing a cushion when there was nothing we could say in response to the story being shared. Whether it was oppressive administrations, harassment from supervisors or fellow co-workers, or the difficulties of working with the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, the sessions revealed layers of abuse, a plexus of organizations dwelling with trauma over decades.
As the conversations continued, we found ourselves increasingly caught in “emotional empathy” loops of anger, sadness, and compassion as we spoke with participants (Clarke, 2021). We initially anticipated the project would fuel a single session at the Museum Computer Network (MCN) conference, but we soon realized the need to have a whole separate performance of this, which will occur virtually in 2022. Our desire to share their experiences grew from a storytelling project into a much more activist-inflected call to witness a collective moment of disillusionment; to harness the mutual aid spirit of the moment; and to offer catharsis to people who’d felt like they were enduring their troubles alone.
We were mindful and aware of the emotional labor the three of us would endure by giving so much of ourselves to this project. We took that on willingly. Even so, it was a painful and difficult listening process. We committed to the work this project has and continues to demand of us, even as we shifted from seeing it as one creative effort to a holistic modeling of collective empathy and empowerment.
Act III: Reflections On the Road Thus Far
“Museums risk their accreditation if they deaccession objects questionably. But what about staff? These museums deaccessioned half their staff, and no one says anything, but god forbid you sell a painting!”
We began this project envisioning we would write a 10-minute theatre piece for MCN. As we began our interviews, it became very clear this was so much more. Currently, we are writing our script, embracing all aspects of theatricality in our writing. We hope to present a full-length version of this script for a Zoom performance in the spring of 2022.
One common theme of the past few years in the museum education sector has been the rise of mutual aid and solidarity movements. It seems like every week there’s a new museum unionization effort or a new round of Museum Workers Speak funding. These efforts contrast deeply with what so many of our participants told us about how their institutions didn’t communicate lay-offs or furloughs (or, in some cases, much of anything) clearly or thoughtfully — that a sense of human decency got lost in the fraught business realities of the pandemic.
Even more of them told us they were grateful for the chance to share their stories. What had started as an interesting creative project between the three of us became an opportunity to amplify multiple voices that were notably different from the institutional and media conversations in the field, which tended to leave little room for polyvocality. We came to see our project as another form of mutual aid — a recognition of the deep human need to be seen and heard that had been sorely neglected for so many people.
As we ended each of our interviews, we asked people what they wanted to share with the leadership of both their institutions and with the GLAM field overall. Overwhelmingly, they told us that it was the missing humanity and respect for individuals’ work and dedication that they most wanted to change.
“Museums are about people, not objects. Why are there no accreditation standards around how you treat people? If you tried to sell a painting they’d be on a soapbox screaming. But nothing when you lay off half the staff”
In this project, we did something that doesn’t feel radical at all, but is radical within the object-centered hierarchical world of museums. We made deliberate choices to create a process that centered humanity over human resources.
“So we get this Webex webinar link, and it’s weird because we can’t see who is in the meeting, and we can’t see who is talking. It’s just this disembodied voice. There’s no Q or A. And then our director came on. He sounded like a recording. I think he was reading from a paper. So I was like, okay, this is happening live. This is how we’re all being laid off.”
In this piece, we present not only our own voices, but those of our participants who shared a broad spectrum of concerns related to museums and social justice. Included in the body of stories are — to name only a few — frank discussions of mental health, work situations of blatant discrimination around identity markers, and museum leaders’ stated refusals to support workers’ pursuits of DEAI initiatives and individual needs. The three of us committed to naming and breaking down the white supremacist culture that governs our museum structures. The stories we’ve gathered and coalesced address beliefs such as perfectionism, power hoarding, urgency, and defensiveness. Through our work, we describe an alternative path to collective witnessing and care that we believe the field needs, writ large.
Recently, writers from the HmntyCntrd collective partnered with dscout to write about the ways that organizations respond to employees who present concerns about the workplace. The “playbooks” commonly used to counter questions around unsustainable work environments sharply contrast with the reality faced by culture workers who find themselves tied to what they love doing. Yet a love of one’s vocation cannot come at the cost of one’s sense of self (Villamil et al., 2022). For example, BIPOC individuals are often directly or implicitly asked to commodify themselves for the sake of educating their fellow colleagues. As librarian, archivist, and artist Kevin Whiteneir Jr. (2022) writes, the commodification of Black people, particularly Black women, as signifiers of social activism and progressivism within institutions can lead to a degradation of DEAI (diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion) work and institutional equity.
How can we prevent institutions from co-opting and changing the intentions of those striving towards justice, even as those same institutions are tasked with necessary equity work for the betterment of their staff and visitors alike? To become trauma-informed organizations, as the writers of HmntyCntrd conclude, administrators must take a long, deep look at themselves and reflect upon what they could do better. What does cultivating self-aware leaders look like? How might exercising greater employer transparency lead to increased trust? What would it mean to gather support from multiple community-based and grounded sources rather than relying upon internal staff who already have job duties to fulfill? Working with external consultants with the requisite expertise who are also accustomed to handling trauma and using equity-centered practices could go a long way towards increasing organizational capacity and lessening employee burnout (Villamil et al., 2022).
“It just feels like there’s a disconnect between the institution they said they wanted to create, and how they handled the layoff.”
While we continue to work and study within the realm of cultural institutions, we reckon with, struggle against, and move through hope towards action. Stories gathered for this project add to ways of knowing that should be championed by the sector. While it’s easy to dismiss such narratives as ‘unprofessional behavior’ or ‘hurt feelings,’ this body of qualitative evidence demonstrates how truly it behooves GLAM leaders to reconsider the humanity of their fundamental operating principles. Not only should such a reconsideration encompass the treatment of their workers, but also their plans to dismantle oppressive structures that don’t allow for full recontextualization of the artifacts they profess to have in their custody (not to mention the stories of people whose lives have been spent preserving and making such artifacts accessible to the public in the first place).
Lost Jobs, Found Voices is a form of counter-story; a living, breathing, and resounding NO to the positivist perspectives taken up by not only a sector but also a society unsuccessfully willing itself back to ‘normal.’ We are inspired by one of the examples showcased in librarians and humanists Anna Cong-Huyen and Kush Patel’s (2021) chapter in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, and in particular, appreciate their approach about what’s not incorporated into the official record in order to preserve professional niceties. Indeed, the “silences, absences, erasures, and quiet traumas” are deliberately evoked here to help restore the circumstances from which precarious labor emerges, making more apparent the livelihoods often exploited by institutions (Cong-Huyen & Patel, 2021, p. 265). Taking the tools shared by many engaging thinkers and do-ers around us, we present this process as a means for reaffirming personhood and the beauty of being in community with each other.
We hope that both the way we framed this project and the forthcoming final script can serve as a model for how to collect and share stories safely, respectfully, and creatively.
We hope that this project can serve as one model for how museum practitioners today might thoughtfully amplify the voices of people who have not previously told their stories or who haven’t felt safe enough to share them.
We hope that as cultural organizations move forward, those in leadership roles can remember that their staff needs the chance to speak openly and to be truly heard; that a museum is not a machine made of cogs but a network made of people.
We hope sharing the resonances of what we’ve experienced can reframe experiences for others, and make workers feel less alone.
We hope this project of collective listening and amplification of multiple voices can serve as a model for both how and why the discipline of museum education can move ahead. We need to honor the people who make up our institutions, and we share this text and this process about their why, as well as their why not when their work is not valued as it should be. Although their institutions did not value those gifts, we do.
Alli Hartley-Kong
Alli is a museum educator and playwright currently located in the Washington DC metro area. Alli began her professional career as a museum educator with a master’s degree from George Washington University, and worked for institutions such as the Smithsonian, Fairfax County Parks, and Fosterfields Living Historical Farm. After experiencing a pandemic layoff, she found her pivot into the world of playwriting. She has received commissions from Single Carrot Theatre and Central Square Theatre, and had her work produced by theatres such as Fusion, Irvington Theatre, Carlow Little Theatre, and more. Last February, she received third-place in a pro-choice playwriting competition, and her work was staged by a team of Broadway actors and directors.
Currently, Alli works at the Library of Congress, where she is developing content for a family learning space. She enjoys combining her passion for history and primary sources with her approach towards storytelling. Alli has spent the seven years writing about issues around labor in museums, and the museum field in general. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian and Hyperallergic. One of her favorite projects was penning a chapter for The Care and Keeping of Museum Workers.
Rachel Ropeik
Rachel Ropeik is an educator, adventurer, facilitator, experience builder, and pirate who brings strategic, playful, and progressive approaches to catalyzing change in arts and culture. She works independently to help arts and culture organizations make creative, lasting change. She believes in art as a vehicle for connecting people across difference and facilitate all manner of experiences to make that happen.
Rachel’s greatest goal is for people to leave an experience she’s designed or facilitated with a sense of surprise. She centers equity and experimentation to accomplish that, and holds tight to her core values of authenticity, transparency, and vulnerability. You might find her on adventures about anti-racism, digital technology, accessibility issues, multisensory learning, playfulness, and more. You will certainly find her an empathetic listener, an adaptive leader, and a people-oriented direct communicator.
Before heading out on her own, Rachel worked for over a dozen years in various institutional museum education roles. Most recently, she was the Learning Director at the Aspen Art Museum into and throughout the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. She’s previously worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, and the Met in New York; Dulwich Picture Gallery and The Courtauld Gallery in London; Smarthistory/the Khan Academy online; and several high-end educational travel companies. She has also taught museum education at Pratt Institute, served on the New York City Museum Educators Roundtable board, and led professional development sessions for local and national organizations including NYCMER, the Museum Computer Network, and the American Alliance of Museums.
On top of that, she can tell you a good story if you ask her about the time she held a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting or had to figure out how much Marilyn Monroe’s wardrobe was worth.
Mimosa Shah
Mimosa Shah (she/her) is a library and museum worker. For six and a half years, she coordinated adult public programs for community members at Skokie Public Library. Currently, she is an intern with dual appointments at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Photography and Media department and through Columbia University Libraries’ Ask A Librarian program.
Mimosa is a 2020 ALA Spectrum Scholar, and is also an active member of the Museum Computer Network (MCN) and Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA). Some of her interests include critical information literacy; inclusive pedagogical practices; online communities and their patterns of media consumption and production; and zines and book arts.
Mimosa will be receiving an MS in library and information sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2022. Prior to this, Mimosa received a BA in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also earned an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, where she wrote a thesis examining the role of melodrama as a site of expressing emerging feminist identity in Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film “Devi.”
References
Clarke, J. (2021, October 4). How empathy can improve your relationships. Verywell Mind. Retrieved March 17, 2022, from https://www.verywellmind.com/cognitive-and-emotional-empathy-4582389
Cong-Huyen, A., & Patel, K. (2021). In S. Y. Leung & López-McKnight, Jorge R. (Eds.), Knowledge justice: Disrupting library and information studies through critical race theory (pp. 263–282). essay, The MIT Press.
Held, V. (2007). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press.
Hight, J. (2021, May 26). Singer Allison Russell shares personal saga of trauma and Triumph on ‘Outside Child’. NPR. Retrieved March 17, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/1000521784/singer-songwriter-allison-russell-shares-a-personal-saga-of-trauma-and-triumph-o
Villamil, A. N., Eisenhauer, K., & Catillo, V. (2022, January 10). Dscout + HMNTYCNTRD: Challenging company playbooks to workplace trauma. People Nerds. Retrieved March 17, 2022, from https://dscout.com/people-nerds/organizational-trauma
Whiteneir, K. T. (2022, January 24). Protect Your Magic: A Cautionary Tale of Witchcraft, Anti-Racism, Activism, and Commodification. Sixty Inches from Center. Retrieved March 17, 2022, from https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/protect-your-magic-a-cautionary-tale-of-witchcraft-anti-racism-activism-and-commodification/kevin2019_-6-4/
