Beyond the Participatory Project : Practices of Organising, Planning and Doing Participation in Museums

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates practices that constitute participation in museums, building on information studies’ tradition of exploring work of professionals in memory institutions. In an effort to democratise, memory institutions have been increasingly interested in working with external stakeholders and audiences through various collaborative, participatory and engagement projects. Scholarship on this type of work in museums largely focuses on if and how specific participatory goals are best achieved in projects. Instead, the aim of this study is to understand how participation is organisationally situated, maintained and done in museums. The thesis is based on a multi-sited ethnographic investigation set in two Northern European museums: Fisksätra Museum in Sweden and Museum Europäischer Kulturen in Germany. By describing and analysing practices of practitioners in preparation of, throughout and in-between different participatory projects in these two museums, the thesis advances our understanding of the work of doing participation.Museum practitioners work with and around internal and external systems through repeated and continuing practices that create and maintain both social and financial resources for participation. Participatory projects are planned in negotiation with socio-material structures of the museum organisation, as well as individual interpretations of participatory goals. During projects, practitioners engage participants in practices of making and sharing, by framing the project through explaining, organising meetings and project management, and reflecting on this work.The findings suggest practices of participation in museums can be understood as maintenance work. This work is contextually bound by the museum organisation and requires structural support. Practitioners and participants also engage in emotion work, including emotion and affective labour, which can benefit interaction with cultural heritage but also problematises the frequent affective quality of work shared with external audiences. Based on the findings, participation is proposed to constitute of practices which configure material, people and systems in and between three contexts: the organisation, moment(s) of interaction, and the museum’s institutional and local context. By understanding participation as a practice-based infrastructure, this study proposes future research and practice to consider participatory goals as pragmatically realised and negotiated, in further contexts than projects alone.