Storytelling in Museums: Adina Langer on Personal Stories, Shared Authority and an Ethics of Care

In episode 131 of the Preservation Technology Podcast — the National Park Service series on the people and projects that bring innovation to preservation, produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) — Catherine Cooper talks with Adina Langer, editor of the book Storytelling in Museums, about how museums tell stories. What follows summarizes the conversation.

The episode: "Telling Stories in Museums." National Park Service.

From treasure houses to storytellers

Langer thinks storytelling has come of age in museums over roughly the past 20 years. Museums used to be mainly about connoisseurship — preserving the finest objects of human life or the natural world. Now they're mainly about education and engagement: helping people understand their place in the world, and use the past to make sense of the present. That makes museums places of communication, with storytelling at the center.

She sees the GLAM fields — galleries, libraries, archives and museums — as points on one spectrum, running from preservation to interpretation:

• archives gather and preserve material and make it available to people who need it;
• toward the interpretation end, an institution has to choose what to focus on, where to draw inspiration, and how to serve its community.

Gathering and telling stories has become central to all of them.

Where the book came from

It began with a session Langer led at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) conference in 2016 on personal narratives — how museums use individual stories to open up larger public histories.

That grew out of her own work:

She wanted to face the ethics of that work. What right does an institution have to excerpt people's stories to address big historical subjects? And there is a burden of urgency: first-person witnesses don't live forever. Some responders and survivors she had interviewed at the 9/11 Memorial had died, and the World War II generation was nearing the end of its life. Once people have trusted a museum with their stories, the museum becomes their memory carrier — and must also think about what the next generation doesn't know, and how varied voices can help it understand the past.

She built the panel through what was then a lively community of historians and museum people on Twitter, bringing in Margaret Middleton, an independent designer and scholar of LGBTQ+ experience in museums and public history, contacts from the Tenement Museum and the 9/11 Museum, and a manager of several museums in Australia dealing with World War I memory and Indigenous stories.

When AAM invited book proposals as the pandemic began, she pitched a collection of essays capturing the state of the practice in the 21st century.

Building a varied book

Her aim was diversity in every sense — of lived experience, of role (education, curation, collections, social media, and museum-adjacent work beyond exhibitions and programs) and of place. Old contacts from graduate school and New York had scattered across the country; a colleague from Morocco wrote about changing museum practice there; a designer who had worked in the U.S., Canada and Asia joined, and Middleton had moved to the U.K. More than a decade editing the National Council on Public History's blog, History@Work, gave her the confidence to take on a project this size, though it meant a lot of learning.

Beyond "shared authority"

When Langer was in graduate school, the watchword was shared authority: an institution holds cultural authority and shares it by reaching out to the community. That's still good, she says, but the field has moved further — toward asking what community members want and what they'll gain. It's a partnership, not institutional generosity. If people want their stories told, how can the museum help? If they don't — or don't want them told the way they were before — what does the museum owe them?

A Twitter conversation on July 8, 2020, hosted by the National Council on Public History ("An Evening with Aleia Brown"), on an ethics of care left a strong impression: that it can matter more to listen than to assume. Museums, in her view, answer to several groups at once — the people who entrust them with objects and stories, and the future generations the material is kept for — and they act as a bridge for visitors trying to connect their own lives with people from the past or from other cultures.

The book's chapters come out of the reflection of 2020, when museums looked hard at their own wrongs and some critics asked whether they could be saved at all — whether they were incurably colonialist or racist. Langer's hope comes from what she saw editing the book: professionals determined to use whatever privilege they have to repair harms done to and within communities, by listening as well as speaking.

Who it's for

The book is written for museum and preservation professionals, public historians and art historians — but Langer hopes curious readers outside those fields will find it accessible too:

• journalists, who often assume a hierarchy with big old institutions above small community museums — an assumption the field itself is questioning;
• anyone who has seen themselves in a museum, or hasn't and wondered why;
• anyone who wants to see behind the curtain. As a child she loved museums without realizing real people worked there. Museums remain among society's most trusted institutions at a time when trust is scarce, and the book offers many views of how and why they do what they do.

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Sources

Based on "Podcast 131: Telling Stories in Museums," Preservation Technology Podcast, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Adina Langer's words are summarized; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The episode's audio, which the imported page did not carry, is restored from the podcast's feed (2026-09-27).