Setting the Scene for Participation: Socio-Technical Negotiations in Museum Work

Abstract

Over the last two decades, cultural heritage institutions and museums have realigned their social role through emphasis of outreach to a broader audience, democratic dialogue with users, and engagement with previously marginalised groups. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the conditions under which these goals can be met in a long-term and sustainable manner. Its objective is to identify infrastructural qualities of museum work that influence the potential of museum work for participation and social inclusion. This is accomplished by using an infrastructure studies approach for deconstructing the complexity and multiplicity of institutional memory-making practices, in order to show their reliance on socio-technical negotiations taking place in the background. The methodology for examining infrastructural museum practices combines multi-sited ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and grounded theory. Star’s perspective of ‘ethnography of infrastructure’ is applied to examine circumstances of informal work arrangements, hidden layers of incompatibility that resulted in potential infrastructure failure, and structural issues in collections management activities in museum environments. The study reconsiders the role of everyday actors who perform documentation, support work, maintenance and repair, as well as their presence in the daily operations of an institution and the relational nature of their presence. The analyses of staff routines reveal that diverse distributive groups of marginalised actors collectively construct an idea of participation and inclusion within the complex back-stage settings of institutional memory work. The thesis demonstrates how an STS-oriented infrastructure studies approach can be useful for gaining a better understanding of the socio-technical underpinnings of action and implementation when diverse actors in the museum settings align the everyday work practices with their envisioned participatory prospect.