The Incluseum at Ten: Three Museum Activists on Inclusion

Episode 145 of the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, has host Catherine Cooper talking with the three people behind The Incluseum, a long-running project on inclusion in museums:

The episode: "Creating Inclusive Museums", from the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast.

• Dr. Porchia Moore, rotating program head of Critical Museum Studies at the University of Florida;
• Dr. Rose Paquet, an independent scholar and artist in California;
• Aletheia Wittman, an independent consultant and coach for museums and the cultural heritage sector, in Seattle.

How they came to it

Wittman and Paquet met as classmates in the University of Washington's museum studies program. Wittman was studying how art museums committed to social justice were changing curatorial practice, and wanted to know what the conversation about inclusion had been before she arrived, so she could build her own work on it ethically. Neither could find where that conversation was happening.

Paquet had come to Seattle from Alaska, where she worked on repatriation projects for the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak and saw a museum act as a lively resource for its community. In Seattle she worked with a group offering art classes and museum visits to adults who were or had been homeless, which became her graduate focus. Passing homeless people outside a Seattle museum, she felt the gap between the idea of a museum for everyone and the people it treated as outside its community, and she asked what they themselves would find meaningful in a museum.

The two started The Incluseum as a place to connect people and ideas, so that those who cared about inclusion would not feel they were working alone.

Moore found it while in a library and information science program at the University of South Carolina in 2011, on a Laura Bush 21st Century Leadership Librarian grant as one of a cohort of about eight Cultural Heritage Informatics Leadership (CHIL) librarians charged with tackling problems across galleries, libraries, archives and museums. She specialized in museums and also earned a graduate certificate in museum management. Her mother, a fourth-grade teacher, had filled weekends with trips to historic sites; growing up Black and female in the Deep South, Moore loved them but noticed missing stories, and that she was often the only person of color there, or one of a few. Critical race theory and the idea of scholarship as activism gave her a lens, but she lacked the language, until she read The Incluseum and felt she had found her people. Her first call with Paquet ran well over an hour. She wanted to move past "diversity," which she regards as a term that does nothing to dismantle existing systems, toward inclusion and liberation.

From blog to book

With The Incluseum approaching its tenth anniversary, they wrote Transforming Inclusion in Museums: The Power of Collaborative Inquiry. Paquet was finishing a doctorate whose research suited it. Moore said the pandemic was a catalyst: in 2020, with museums closing, staff laid off or furloughed and open letters circulating, it was time to take stock. Named museum activists early on, the three looked back on a decade of collaborators and conversations at conferences such as AAM, Museum Computer Network, Museums and the Web, AASLH and NCPH.

Wittman described the book's shape:

• their personal stories, and the question that brought them together — what is inclusion?
• a genealogy of inclusion in museums, told openly from their own vantage point and crediting the decades of work before them;
• a move from past to present to future, with critical questions at the end of every chapter inviting readers to bring their own experience — a habit from blogging, where the point is the dialogue.

What comes next

Moore hopes museum studies programs will teach the book as an example of taking one word and working it into real change, and she sees a new generation of students already asking new questions. Wittman said The Incluseum has always moved only as fast as trust allows, following where collaborators and conversations lead. With museums shaken, she pointed to unionizing, pay transparency and staff wellbeing as the issues now emerging, and hopes museums can become model workplaces rather than laggards.

All three contributed to every chapter, in a way of working the pandemic reshaped. Moore said it felt like a continuation of a decade of warmth, empathy and mutual respect — responsive and reflexive rather than scripted, as when she, Paquet and Margaret Middleton scrapped a whole presentation at an AAM conference in Atlanta. Paquet said that way of working practices what The Incluseum argues for: listening, taking time, and not rushing when the aim is to build trust.

Sources

Based on the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, Episode 145, "Creating Inclusive Museums," produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (public domain); the guests' words are rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The episode's audio is the National Park Service's own file, from the podcast's feed.