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27

FEBRUARY

DIFFICULT HISTORIES

Reading No. 1

From History to Reality: Engaging Visitors in the Imperial War Museum

Museum Management & Curatorship

Raymond Powell & Jithendran Kokkranikal

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Reading No. 2

Investigating the Therapeutic Potential of a Heritage-Object Focused Intervention: A Qualitative Study

Journal of Health Psychology

Anne Lanceley, Guy Noble, Michelle Johnson, Nyala Balogun, Helen Chatterjee, Usha Menon

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Reading No. 3

Museums and Art Galleries as Partners for Public Health Interventions

Perspectives in Public Health 

Paul M. Camic & Helen J. Chatterjee

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Reading No. 4

Telling My Story: From Narrative to Exhibit in Illuminating the Lived Experience of Homelessness among Older African American Women

Journal of Health Psychology

Olivia G.M. Washington & David P. Moxley

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CLASS LECTURE NOTES:

Review notes from this week's class lecture

Reading No. 1

From History to Reality: Engaging with Visitors at The Imperial War Museum

Museum Management and Curatorship

Raymond Powell & Jithendran Kokkranikal

"...contemplation of [museum] collections leads to an improved comprehension of the world we live in.”

Museums are about:

            1. Experiences

            2. Education

            3. Entertainment

 

Visitor Engagement:

  • Visitor engagement is about ensuring accessibility (physical and intellectual) to deliver a rewarding visitor experience.

 

  • How to attract the public to the museum and provide them with a memorable experience?

 

Role of Museums:

1. Functional: acquiring, conserving, communicating, and exhibiting artifacts for study/education—These museum types are object based and internally focused

 

2. Purposive: visitor enjoyment and education of collection—These museums are externally focused and people-based

 

Domains that are fundamental to museums:

            1. materiality

            2. engagement

            3. representation

 

Dimensions of Visitor Engagement (provide understanding of visitor engagement):

            1. Anticipation

            2. Traveling to location

            3. Behavior at the site

            4. Return travel (going home)

            5. Recollection of trip later on

 

“…as society changes from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy…learning will increasingly be in the domain of leisure in a way that it has not fully been before.”

 

Museums are structured to provide education and leisure simultaneously

 

Diverse audiences means multiple engagement strategies

 

“The IMW strives to develop a symbiotic relationship with its audiences…”

  •             Experience different perspectives

  •             Embrace uncertainties

  •             Debate difficult issues

  •             Ask questions

  •             Develop insight into issues surrounding war and conflict and its impact on society

 

How IMW structures learning and engagement:

  • Member of staff offers interpretative advice

  • Handling of selected displayed artifacts

  • Visitors are able to interact with exhibits in interesting and stimulating ways

  • Visitors are placed at the center of planning

  • Use space and location to provide context “…that bit where they showed the bombing was unbelievable…that happened where we were standing…75 years ago it would have been real bombs”

  • Visitors follow suggested route paths through the exhibition

  • Visitors ask questions

  • Uses its space and scale to its advantage--“It is small and manageable…I do not get overwhelmed with stuff here…”

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Having a visitor engagement plan is important to the success of understanding what visitors want and how they experience your museum

 

Keys to a good plan:

  1. Effective communication with visitors and potential visitors

  2. Identify who visits and why

  3. Attract non-museum goers

  4. Enhance access (physical and cultural)

  5. Think from the perspective of the visitor (how do they see your museum?)

  6. Establish community links

  7. Control visitor flow with signage and layouts

Reading no1
Reading No2

Reading No. 2

Investigating the Therapeutic Potential of a Heritage-Object Focused Intervention: A Qualitative Study

Journal of Health Psychology

Anne Lanceley, Guy Noble, Michelle Johnson, Nyala Balogun, Helen Chatterjee, Usha Menon

“The object can act as a repository or container for projections of different and difficult states of mind.”

Engagement with the arts has shown to have a positive impact on the well-being in health contexts including:

  •             Stress

  •             Anxiety

  •             Depression

  •             Pain intensity

  •             Overall mental adjustment to illness

 

 

In cancer care, attempts to help patients adapt to:

  •             Alter their patterns of thinking

  •             Attenuate emotional difficulties and distress

  •             Reduce symptoms

 

Study examined the use of museum objects as a psychotherapeutic resource or intervention approach for people with cancer.

 

Heritage objects can carry symbolic meaning for individuals if feelings are projected onto them.

 

Key themes emerged in discussions with patients:

            1. survival

            2. fear of cancer

            3. powerlessness

            4. reproductive capacity

            5. female family history

 

The object helps to facilitate disclosure of what otherwise might not have come out in the clinical setting

 

Using heritage objects helps to provide:

            1. Identity

            2. continuity

            3. stability

during times of personal strife or disruption

 

Physically holding an object is a powerful experience—“the objects gave women a vocabulary to convey their feelings to themselves and to others”

 

“The object bridged the patients’ external world and their inner world of phantasies.” 

Reading No. 3

Museums and Art Galleries as Partners for Public Health Interventions

Perspectives in Public Health 

Paul M. Camic & Helen J. Chatterjee

"Real knowing occurs through experience and much of what we learn through experience cannot be conveyed in words"

Museums and galleries can play a social role in health care

 

Museums are aptly placed to be partners in health care as they have become more aware of the needs and interests of local communities

 

Museums provide outreach activates to those who are often socially excluded from participation

 

Museums currently offer programs for:

            Caregivers to provide education

            Tackling challenging health care problems

 

Museums help people learn about themselves as well as culture

 

Museums seek to encourage social inclusion and provide networks within the community

“Individuals who are socially isolated are between two and five times more likely than those who have strong social ties to die prematurely.”

 

Studies have shown that arts-based organizations and programs can reduce psychological and physiological symptoms

 

Museums help health and well-being by:

            1. promoting relaxation

            2. providing immediate intervention in physiology and emotions

            3. encourage introspection

            4. foster health education

            5. act as public health advocates

 

Museum objects help to trigger memories in ways that other materials don’t

“object interactions help them recall memories and encourage interactivity”

 

Collaborations between museums and health care entities could encourage new research partnerships and be beneficial to streamlining any overlapping procedures in the arts and health sector. Collaboration boosts performance of both industries, providing mutually beneficial outcomes. 

Reading No 4
Reading No 3

CLASS LECTURE NOTES

History can be taught that ignores a significant portion of the class you’re teaching

Socioeconomic

Sexual Orientation

Race

 

Homelessness Article—two huge issues that are difficult to address but explores how they can

 

El Jardin de Los Ninos, Roasrio, Argentina

Photographic exhibition

Photographer worked with people who had family members who disappeared in the 1970s

            Photos of people before they were separated and a comparison to those who are still in Argentina in the same location as original photo

            Reenactment process to help come to terms with past events

Powerful and public exhibition

 

La Isla de Iventos, Rosario, Argentina

Interactive exhibit

Collective art experience—created for people to make sense for themselves

As you overturn pebbles, visitors can reveal different poems that are running under the stones.

Relationship to past without picture or spoken word

 

Apartheid Museum Johannesburg

Tour guide was secondary education teacher

Hector Peterson Memorial

1970-1980s during peak apartheid

Stopped education in English in Africa

Control of oppressors over African people

Education wasn’t entirely separated before this time, but these new regulations changed it

Hector Peterson was 11-12 and joined demonstrations against education oppression and was shot and killed by police

Desmond Tuttu’s church was just around the corner (anti- apartheid campaigners gathered there)

Can visit the museum as a white person or a colored person

Architecture is very challenging and a bit scary (overwhelming feeling of power and authority)

 

Imperial War Museum

Looking at different aspects of what it was like to be a soldier

Conscientious Objectors—what happened to those people (usually imprisoned). Often this story goes untold and not for public consumption

WWI

Archives

 

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Glasgow Museums

Red Road: Past, Present, Future

Red Road flats were the tallest flats anywhere in Europe

Became very unpleasant to live in and became refugee housing

People had strong views about the conditions in which people were living as well as a strong opinion of the people living in them

Community history project—put together by a community group in conjunction with the museum

1971—used to hole 4,000 people and was 31 stories high

 

Skeletal remains—Marischal Museum

Skeleton from cist found at the upper mains of Catterline, Kinneff, Kincardine

Contentious issue, people have different ideas about what is appropriate. What is appropriate for public display. At what point does it become unacceptable for human remains to be on display?

x-ray inside the mummy?

Fully mummy?

Many issues around what is appropriate for visitors

 

Slavery

How people have treated others in the past (and arguably the present too)

Clothes we wear and what we eat are likely dependent on others labor

History of colonialism

Cities are founded often on the backs of slavery

Thinking about things through the eyes of a white point of view and through the eyes of the oppressed

Histories of the slave trade

Museum in Scotland started a project of gold weights in relation to the slave trade (used this to think about trade and issues relating to slavery now)—Fair trade, child soldiers (looking broadly at exploitation)

 

Belief Tackling

Sectarianism, St. Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art

Contentious lived experiences of central belt Scottish people

Teacher training done through the churches, but schools were state sponsored

Agreed that could be separate catholic schools

If you Glasgow and Edinburgh, Catholic primary and secondary schools

Catholic primary in Aberdeen, but not secondary

Had catholic and protestant shipyards (if not the right religion could be difficulty getting a job well into the 20th century)

 

How many objects in the collections are actually helpful in starting these difficult conversations?

Class lecture notes

Reading No. 4

Telling My Story: From Narrative to Exhibit in Illuminating the Lived Experience of Homelessness among Older African American Women

Journal of Health Psychology

Olivia G.M. Washington & David P. Moxley

"[Humanities] open up the possibility of creating representations that at a minimum help members of the audience to appreciate the lived experience of those individuals with whom audience members may have little to no contact."

Narratology suggest that much is to be learned from the experiences of individuals.

 

Humanities demonstrate how the lived experience of a sole individual can express the entire scope of a particular social issue.

 

Narrative

Art

Exhibit

Poetry

Performance

Can serve as important tools for knowledge development when the aims of inquiry include an understanding of the lived experience or capturing first person accounts of trauma.

 

Humanities place a human face on quantified data—provide a more rich understanding for learners.

 

Humanistic models demand emotional and empathic regard from audience members—thus arousing people to action.

 

Communication in first person detail is key!

 

Art and performance help to amplify the influence of audience participation in exhibitions.

 

 

Homelessness is often viewed as a private and personal affair for women, creating this narrative exhibition changed that perspective.

 

Without public or community understanding, the voices of these women may go unheard and unheeded. Often homelessness remains out of the public eye….

 

Homelessness is an intersectional issue created by many predicaments—some personal, but many systematic.

 

Dewey (1934) ‘art as an expression of “the life of the community”’

 

Anderson’s definition of art which is grounded in the connection of art to culture: art involves “culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an effecting, sensuous meaning”.

 

Narrative exhibition was meant to:

1. Illuminate the live experience of homelessness among older African American women

2. Develop useful and effective interventions

3. Amplify the voices of these homeless women in order to foster community understanding of homelessness

 

…”Narration offers cathartic benefits: participants can express powerful pent-up emotions and unburden themselves of these feelings and thereby liberate energy from problem solving”

 

Homelessness wastes human potential

 

Conceptual art challenges the viewer to make sense of what is going on within the portrait.

 

Incorporated within the exhibition was a form of free choice learning.

Visitors are able to prioritize their viewing, interact at will with other visitors, move at their own pace, return to objects of interest, and interact with docents, curators, and investigators.

 

Visitors gathered in small groups to discuss aesthetics and content as well as story

 

These portraits allowed visitors to look at civil society, homelessness, relationships between social institutions, city infrastructure, and individual lived experiences. Race, class, gender, and age were also examined.

 

Realizations about self were made, “this could have been me!”, “this was me!”

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