Workshop: Museum Work: Hierarchies and Barriers, Exclusion and Inclusion

The network’s opening workshop, "Museum Work: Hierarchies and Barriers, Exclusion and Inclusion", will take place in person at Birkbeck in May 2023. I particular, it will consider how hierarchies within and barriers to museum work have developed historically and manifest themselves today, and how such hierarchies have been and continue to be challenged and negotiated by those excluded and disempowered by museums.

For the first workshop, Kate Hill and Claire Wintle are seeking proposals for short presentations from museum practitioners and scholars engaged in museum history or practice on topics related to hierarchies, barriers, and inclusion/exclusion in museum work from historical and contemporary perspectives. Deadline for submissions is Monday, March 6, 2023. For more information on the requirements, click here.

The Making Museum Professionals network is responding to growing campaigns in the museum sector for fairer recruitment and career structures. Across the world, campaign groups have highlighted the systematic inequality faced by many of the people working in and with museums. This new network will support such campaigns for fairness, inclusion, and transparency by investigating the historical roots of the museum professions and the structures that supported them, from the birth of the modern museum (ca. 1850) to the present day. It asks how museum professions came into being and how they produced particular competences and working methods. The network also seeks to critically develop productive links between academics and museum professionals, creating spaces, practices and outputs for dialogues between past, present, and future, and to conceptualize historical practice as a tool to improve accessible professionalization today.