‘Engage the World’: examining conflicts of engagement in public museums

Ashley, Susan (2014) ‘Engage the World’: examining conflicts of engagement in public museums. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 20 (3). pp. 261-280. ISSN 1028-6632

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2013.808630

Abstract

Public engagement has become a central theme in the mission statements of many cultural institutions, and in scholarly research into museums and heritage. Engagement has emerged as the go-to-it-word for generating, improving or repairing relations between museums and society at large. But engagement is frequently an unexamined term that might embed assumptions and ignore power relationships. This article describes and examines the implications of conflicting and misleading uses of ‘engagement’ in relation to institutional dealings with contested questions about culture and heritage. It considers the development of an exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto in 2009 within the new institutional goal to ‘Engage the World’. The chapter analyses the motivations, processes and decisions deployed by management and staff to ‘Engage the World’, and the degree to which the museum was able to re-think its strategies of public engagement, especially in relation to subjects,issues and publics that were more controversial in nature.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in International Journal of Cultural Policy, 20 (3) [28 June 2013] [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10286632.2013.808630.
Uncontrolled Keywords: engagement, museums, democratisation, communities, cultural institutions, difficult exhibitions
Subjects: L900 Others in Social studies
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Arts
Depositing User: Dr Susan Ashley
Date Deposited: 03 Jul 2013 11:25
Last Modified: 17 Dec 2023 14:51
URI: https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/13134

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