Helen. 2003. “To Charge or Not to Charge: Museum’s Admission Dilemma.” Insights 14: A145–A150. London: English Tourism Council.
Further Reading
Craik, Jennifer. 2007. Re-visioning Arts and Cultural Policy: Current Impasses and Future Directions. Canberra: ANU EPress.
Miller, Toby, and George Yudice. 2002. Cultural Policy. London: Sage.
Museum International. 2006. Special Issue: Museums and Cultural Policy. 232 58(4). Accessed September 20, 2014. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/muse.2006.58.issue-4/issuetoc.
O’Brien, Dave. 2014. Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries. London: Routledge.
Sara Selwood is an independent cultural analyst and consultant who has worked in museums, galleries, and cultural management for many years in various capacities as a curator, director, trustee, and academic (http://saraselwood.co.uk). She was formerly Professor of Cultural Policy and Management at City University, London, and is currently an Honorary Professor, Institute of Archaeology, University College London. She edits the journal Cultural Trends and has published widely on the relationship between the expectations of UK cultural policy, its implementation, funding, and the public’s experience of cultural provision. Her books include The Benefits of Public Art: The Polemics of Permanent Art in Public Places (1995), and The UK Cultural Sector: Profile and Policy Issues (2001).
Stuart Davies has over 25 years’ experience of working in, and with, the museums, galleries, archives, and heritage sectors. He is currently Director of Stuart Davies Associates (SDA; http://www.sdaconsultants.co.uk) which delivers support for museum and galleries, arts organizations, historic houses, heritage sites, historic landscapes, archives, development agencies, and local authorities throughout the UK. He worked for several government agencies during the New Labour years, including the Heritage Lottery Fund (1997–2000) and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (2000–2004), and authored the government Task Force report, Renaissance in the Regions (2001). Stuart was also President of the UK Museums Association (2008–2010).
4
RECONCEPTUALIZING MUSEUM ETHICS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
A View from the Field1
Janet Marstine, Jocelyn Dodd, and Ceri Jones
In our rapidly changing world museums face increasing demands to engage with complex ethics issues, and to behave ethically. However, the predominant late twentieth-century approach to ethics as professional practice, which relies on ethics codes revised perhaps once a decade and authored by like-minded individuals to produce and implement these codes, has proven to be a constraining factor, rather than an enabling process. In order for museums effectively to negotiate difficult issues as well as ethical opportunities that arise, novel approaches to ethics are required in which the museum sector actively pursues a dynamic ethics-based museum practice. Over the past five years a new model of museum ethics has emerged; it reconceptualizes ethics as a discourse contingent upon transformations in the social, political, technological, and economic domains. Where these transformations interact with museum practice, a new sphere for ethics debate results. Through discussions among diverse stakeholders with divergent viewpoints, ethical issues are identified, considered, and acted upon. Conceptualizing museum ethics as a discourse acknowledges both the intellectual inquiry and social practice that are integral to communications. In addition, our focus on discourse aims to refute the fragmentation of ethics into distinct and overly reductive protocols for professional practice.
The new museum ethics has been shaped by scholarship in several key areas, most notably: the postmodern critical theories of post-colonialism, feminism, and neo-Marxism; new thinking in applied ethics across disciplines; and current research on new museum theory and practice. Encouraging museums to look outward and engage with the wider world through the lens of ethics, it maintains that transparency and self-reflexivity toward the processes and authority that museums hold, helps them to build trust with communities. The new museum ethics advocates placing social responsibility at the heart of museums so as to reinvigorate their mission and values toward contributing to the wellbeing of society (Marstine 2011a).
In order to map the twenty-first-century ethical terrain that museums must negotiate, and to explore how the new museum ethics can be translated effectively into practice, the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG), based in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, embarked in 2011 on a research project with partners the Museums Association (MA) and the Inter- Disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (IDEA CETL) at the University of Leeds. The unique cross-disciplinary nature of the collaboration created a rich environment for new thinking: RCMG researches the social role of museums and engages in knowledge exchange with the museum sector; IDEA CETL helps professionals across disciplines identify, analyze, and respond effectively to ethical issues they encounter in their careers; and the MA is a membership organization for UK museum, gallery, and heritage professionals and sets ethical standards for the sector.
Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under the “Care for the Future” initiative, the project took the form of a research network which brought together some 26 museum leaders, including museum directors, policymakers, senior practitioners, and academics (RCMG 2013), to identify and analyze key ethics issues with which museums are grappling and to test the potential value of the new museum ethics to address these issues. The primary aim of the project was to build a network of expertise in the new museum ethics. While the parameters of the grant dictated that the scale of the network remain modest, with most participants based in the UK, British contributors were joined by a number from Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Together, they represented a cross-section of museum practitioners and researchers active in social and ethical initiatives; group members expressed a range of political perspectives, but shared a set of values rooted in the belief that museums have the potential to play an important social role in addressing inequalities. Many of the conversations could be characterized as encompassing an Anglo-American perspective, but nonetheless raise important questions about ethics in other contexts. Two members of the network are representatives of the MA’s ethics committee, including Nick Merriman, the ethics committee convener. Other network members did not necessarily think of themselves as ethicists, but recognized that they were working to model ethical leadership in their practice.
Led by Janet Marstine and Jocelyn Dodd from RCMG, the research network met during five day-long workshops over 18 months (late 2011 to early 2013). Each workshop was devoted to a specific theme chosen by RCMG in consultation with partner organizations. These themes were: social engagement; transparency; shared guardianship of collections; moving beyond canonicity; and sustainability. Approximately half of the participants were core group members who attended all five workshops, creating a sustained conversation. The other half consisted of guest speakers who attended a single workshop as provocateurs.
This chapter discusses the findings from the research network and presents preliminary ideas about how the new museum ethics might be shared and implemented within the wider museum sector. Support for the model of new museum ethics was unanimous among participants; all agreed that the model represents a powerful and productive framework through which to re-envision museums
