Analysis of community engagement projects 5.1 Introduction
5.3 Discussion
The community consultation that occurred across the case study sites took a number of different forms and resulted in a range of different outcomes for museum staff and community participants. With this said, several recurring themes emerged throughout many of the community engagement projects. Foremost of these was a lack of clear communication and, in the case of The Mind and The Bethlem, a simplistic and
facilitation-based framework for engagement. This framework viewed community work as peripheral to the museums’ core functions of curatorship, an issue that has been discussed in length in Chapter Two and that has been cited as leading to tokenistic outcomes for community participants in other studies. Interestingly, this occurred regardless of staff recognition that maintaining avenues for discussion is vital to functional engagement and that museums, as publicly-funded institutions, have an ethical responsibility to address important social issues and include a diverse range of voices.
The need for clear communication within museums has been highlighted by academics as an essential component for successful engagement (Fouseki and Smith 2013; Onciul 2013). According to Onciul (2013: 92), ‘to keep an engagement zone open and active requires good communication to facilitate ongoing power-sharing, decision making, and the exchange of information’. Likewise, loosely defined notions of community have been linked to a host of negative outcomes (Crooke 2010). An honest acknowledgement of the limitations of what can be achieved within an exhibition, or a clear recognition of the imbalances in power that inevitably exist within the power-laden setting of
museological institutions, is difficult to achieve without proper and effective communication (Fouseki and Smith 2013; Watson 2007). Nor can differences in agendas and opinion over the direction of an exhibition be effectively discussed and
debated without a commitment to dialogue. Engagement is likely to become extractive without a well thought out rationale behind why a museum is undertaking community engagement, a clear understating of the framework of engagement that will be used and a belief that community work is a central function of museums (Weil 2002: 75-80; Fleming 2010, 2016; Waterton 2015).
The inability to acknowledge power imbalances that can come from poor
communication structures and supplementary frameworks for engagement often fosters in community participants a sense that museums are not willing to engage in processes of power-sharing (Smith and Waterton 2009: 19, 78-80, 140). It can likewise lead to the failure to articulate expectations and limitations about what can be achieved during engagement. This can, as was witnessed by several community participants in this study, create disappointment, confusion or a feeling of being used when initial community expectations fall short or are not met (Keith 2012). As noted by Keith (2012: 52):
Unless the temporary nature of the project and the finite boundaries of the partnership are explicitly communicated, feelings of resentment may arise within the community group, leaving the impression that the collaboration between the ‘margins’ and the ‘mainstream’ is both tokenistic and
instrumentalist and poorly valued.
Such approaches then, often engender a belief amongst communities that the engagement is what Lynch and Alberti (2010: 17-18) term ‘participation lite’ – the process of including community voices in the museum to satisfy political or institutional demands.
These issues have plagued a number of community engagement projects that were reviewed in Chapter Two. As this chapter shows, they similarly functioned to
undermine certain collaboration efforts that were observed at a number of the case study sites here. Evidence of this was shown at The Mind, where the curatorial approach to engagement failed to engage the community participants in fruitful discussion.
Although it has been highlighted that curatorial staff at The Mind did not intend for their engagement with community participants to operate as a genuine form of collaboration, this Chapter has demonstrated a number of issues that can arise when engaging
community participants within the museum sphere, even in basic ways, when goals and expectations about what the engagement is for, and what it hopes to achieve, are not
well articulated. At The Mind, the museum’s insistence that it was disinterested in providing a voice for the mentally ill stood in stark contrast to the communities’ desires to express their personal views on the issues that the mentally ill face in contemporary society. The communities that were engaged experienced, to varying degrees, a sense of alienation, dissatisfaction and a belief that they were not really ‘partners’ with the museum. They felt that they were engaged simply to gain access to objects and stories that would enhance the exhibition, which was the outlined purpose by the curatorial staff for engagement. Yet a clearer articulation of what the engagement would entail and a management of expectations may have helped to reduce the confusion around the process of engagement and the subsequent alienation some participants experienced as a result. Unfortunately, this sense of alienation created scepticism regarding the
museum's intentions, a subsequent erosion of trust and prevented the museum from forging a better working relationship.
The interactions that took place between the community participants and curatorial staff at each of the case study sites were also framed by the distinctly confronting nature of mental illnesses. The work of Corrigan et al. (2003) and Hinshaw (2007: 81-83, 95-97, 123-124) discussed in Chapter Three have shown that mental illnesses and the mentally ill tend to challenge and unsettle peoples’ perceptions of control. They force people to reflect on their lack of ability to determine the trajectory of their health and ask
individuals to empathise with people who are seen as outsiders by mainstream society. Curators at each of the case study sites worried about the potential impact that this might have on visitors. While an understandable concern, the failure on behalf of certain curators to adequately balance these fears with the desire of participants to discuss difficult aspects of mental health meant that some participants believed stigma
hampered the exhibition design. This stigma did not manifest in active vilification of the mentally ill. It took the more subtle form of avoidance, where the topic of mental health and the mentally ill were engaged in a manner that ensured a palatable, yet diluted, narrative about mental health issues for the museum audience.
This stigma reduces the opportunities for communities that are engaged by museums to openly engage the public in dialogue about mental health. Ultimately, this risks
reinforcing the unequal power relations that community engagement efforts were developed to redress. The perceived unwillingness to embrace the concerns of mental health community participants and the perceived tendency towards suppression of
certain contentious views around mental health witnessed at The Mind, and to a lesser degree at The Wellcome, is a serious issue. This is because stigma has prevented the mentally ill both historically and in contemporary times from openly discussing aspects of various mental conditions in a variety of social settings (Gray 2002). For instance, fear of declaring or discussing one’s mental health issues within public spheres has carried the consequence of being labelled as ‘other’ and, as a result, the risk of suffering some form of reprisal (Clement et al. 2015). Such an inability to discuss the
uncomfortable issue of mental health has, as a result, contributed to the high levels of social isolation and otherness that the mentally ill continue to experience (SANE Australia 2005, 2014: 2, 15).
Museum-community collaboration with members of the mental health community cannot, therefore, be based on the premise of trying to simply include their voices within a museum context (Arnstein 1969; Varutti 2013). Frameworks based on basic notions of inclusion will go some way to remedying imbalances in the types of mental health voices represented within museological settings. It can also result in a re- entrenching of stigmatised outcomes for some members of various mental health communities. Instead, museum work with mental health communities may benefit from demonstrating a commitment to ‘rethinking’ museum practices and procedures, as Varutti (2013: 70) has argued for.
Part of this rethinkingwhen working with members from various mental health communities may benefit from a consideration of the specific emotional difficulties involved for both curators and community participants when working on projects about mental health. The confronting nature of the topic means that museum staff and
community participants who engage in collaboration on such projects will be placed under emotional strain. Community participants, many of whom already deal with symptoms resulting from their mental disorders, feel keenly the added pressure of stress that comes from navigating engagement with large institutions or that can come from reliving deeply upsetting or destabilising moments in their lives. This can, as occurred at The Bethlem and The Goodna, increase friction between museum and community participants and undermine the museum-community relationship and their willingness to work on such projects in the future. As noted by HH1, a museum’s failure to take account of the stressful nature of mental health work can result in a worsening of mental health symptoms for community participants. This in itself may be viewed by
community members, as it was by HH1 in this study, as a form of institutionalised stigma in which the museum is unable, or unwilling, to accommodate for the specific working needs of participants during and post collaboration.
Formal structures for debriefing then, that are included both during the process of engagement and post-completion, are a necessary component when undertaking
museum work with individuals with mental health issues. This could potentially reduce the burden of both curators and participants that is associated with undertaking the difficult task of developing an exhibition around mental health. It may provide, for example, an opportunity for issues and concerns about the impact that participants’ mental illnesses might have on aspects of collaboration to be raised by both parties and to be worked through as they occur. As noted by Lagerkvist (2006), moments of conflict during collaboration offer an excellent, yet often underutilised, opportunity for reflection and cross-party dialogue to occur.
A central theme that ran through the case study sites was that it is difficult to achieve such reflection if a museum’s commitment to engagement is not based, in part, upon some degree of ethical belief in the necessity of working with community groups. Obviously, as noted in Chapter Two, community engagement may be based upon a range of frameworks and justified in various ways (see Fouseki 2010). This may include the need to gain access to resources or expertise (for example, the stories of individuals with experiences of mental illnesses), a desire to connect with communities in order to maintain relevancy or funding or a belief in the benefits of resource sharing. These categories do not need to be mutually exclusive, nor are they individually non-beneficial or invalid. As is indicated by the interviews discussed above, a failure to view
community work as a core function of museums often leads to supplementary forms of engagement that are quickly viewed by communities as unhelpful, or worse,
stigmatising. Importantly, this does not mean that curatorial control need be ceded away from curators. As noted by Fleming (2006), exhibitions will become cluttered and disorientating when curators do not maintain a degree of control over the directive vision of an exhibition, a point that curators in this study understood. It does mean that curators must be willing to think outside of traditional frames of reference to develop ways of developing exhibitions that are mutually acceptable to staff and participants.
are seen in the outcomes of engagement undertaken at The Goodna and The Wellcome. Clear notions of community, and rationales for choosing to work with community groups, were articulated and perceptions of power and authority were taken into consideration. Suggestions from the community regarding the desire to change the direction of the exhibition resulted in a legitimate rethinking of curatorial practices and significantly altered the direction of the exhibition. This is something that would not have been easy to achieve without their beliefs that museums must engage honestly with communities and people, not objects, to pursue socially conscious goals. The curators and community, for instance, developed mutually accountable and agreeable ways for thinking about psychiatric hospitals and the representation of the lived experiences of the mentally ill. Negotiation about curatorial filters and processes of editing occurred, as did discussions about the form that recognition for community contribution would take. Moments of conflict and difficulty were not avoided. Instead, they were used as a chance to reflect on how curatorial processes could be improved.
It is worth reiterating that challenges remain when engaging the mentally ill in the museum sphere even when such an approach is adopted. Each approach to engagement would benefit from being tailored to the needs of the mental health community
members and participants being engaged. Onciul (2013: 79) is correct when she highlights the seemingly obvious, yet often unaccounted for, fact that ‘What occurs in an engagement zone and what it produces depends upon the collaborative approach used, the participants involved, the way the process unfolds, and the context in which it occurs’.
5.4 Conclusion
Collaboration within a museum context with individuals or groups who have experience of mental illnesses is clearly a difficult and demanding task for all involved. That such collaboration has the potential to be rewarding and, more importantly, to create a sense of empowerment amongst community participants is demonstrated by the case studies. The degree of success depends on the museum’s practical and philosophical approaches to community work, as well as their ability to account for the range of specific needs that participants with mental illnesses may require.
mental illnesses have the potential to profoundly upset certain individuals in ways that dealing with other forms of communities may not. Mental health issues are unique due to their ability to challenge our sense of control and because they can affect anyone regardless of race, class or gender. This was something that curators in this study worried about and it resulted in a furthering of stigmatised outcomes for community participants when poorly navigated by museum staff. The following chapter continues this analysis of the destabilising nature of mental illnesses by analysing the responses offered by visitors to exhibitions at three of the case study sites. It demonstrates that the sense of vulnerability experienced by many visitors resulted in a wide range of
reactions, including that of distancing and avoidance analysed in Chapter Seven. A chapter (Chapter Six) outlining demographic data is first provided to better understand the demographic characteristic of each sample of visitors and how these potentially impacted upon visitor responses and preferences for visiting experiences.