Volume 61 Number 3 July 2018
FROM THE EDITOR
Challenging Exclusion and Museum Doctrine
JOHN FRASER
Economy is a term that troubles museum
practice. We often measure worth in volume of
currency or products, people who walk past the
entrance or donations. But the real return on
investment in museum experience is an
expanded understanding of the world around
us. Museums contribute to community capital
by helping communities become more prepared
to face the challenges that face us in the future.
The authors contributing to this issue call
into question the historical pedagogies that
shape contemporary museum practice, each
seeking to make right a historical exclusion.
Each has approached the topic from a different
perspective, identifying whose voices were sup-
pressed and offering them a platform that can
change the civic dialogue.
The cover image was selected as both meta-
phor and allegory. The Egham Museum con-
structed a micro-diorama to illustrate the
historical signing of the Magna Carta just
803 years ago. This colorful scene depicts one
of the most profound changes in the history of
human culture, the first expansion of human
rights and self-determination, and the contract
that laid the foundation for the principles of
emancipation that slowing and surely led to the
universal declaration of human rights. While
human trafficking and systemic oppression con-
tinue to trouble the world, our history shows
John Fraser, Editor (jfraser@newknowledge.org). John Fraser is President & CEO of New Knowledge Organization
Ltd., Adjunct Professor of Earth Science, Indiana University at IUPUI’s Center for Urban Health and 2018–2019
President of the Society for Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology, Division 34 of the Ameri-
can Psychological Association.
© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
that every generation has incrementally helped
to expand the rights of people to live life to their
fullest.
To use a childhood toy does not diminish
the subject matter. That diorama reminded me
that we should treat some concepts as simple
rather than complex. In this case, very simply
understood, that government authority is a
negotiated legitimacy.
The Egham Museum is also a very small,
low budget, local historical society. An exemplar
of so many museums around the world, their
team used wit and wisdom to convert an
extraordinarily low budget into a celebration of
a community and a true representation of demo-
cratic deliberative and representative democ-
racy. The exhibition narrative offered by
Matthew Smith, for me, captured the spirit of
the dedicated museum professional who could
seize opportunity and built a true monument to
self-determination.
We were also pleasantly surprised to see
two papers that explored medical exclusion.
Zanatta and Zampieri sought fit to redress
a historical oversight in the museum literature
by drawing our attention to the foundational
history of the Medical Museum in Padua, a
robust institution that seems to have been over-
looked by museum historians. Their paper
provides historical documentation of how
399
CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
collections were used over time, and even illus-
trate that the collection continues to be actively
used to understand medical history and pathol-
ogy.
Consistent with our theme of exclusion,
Koebner and colleagues offer a feasibility study
of how art museums might engage in program-
ming as part of a pain management strategy. We
often talk about the role of museums supporting
joy, epiphany and personal pursuits, and this
feasibility study pushes the pedagogical
approach further. Historically, we’ve seen stud-
ies in botanic gardens focused on geriatric ser-
vices and memory, but this is the first paper to
our knowledge that links the museum experi-
ence directly with the alleviation of pain, an
audience that is often concealed as they blend
with other visitors. By raising this question,
Koebner and his colleagues may have offered
new insight into the functional benefit that
museums provide in their communities, but sel-
dom highlight as part of our social purpose.
Unusually, we are publishing two papers by
the same author in this issue, one the presenta-
tion of a framework for redressing historical
tendencies that did not meet the needs of
women visiting museums, and the second an
application of that theory. We note for readers
that these two papers were originally submitted
as one rather complex manuscript. Following
review and discussion with the authors, we rec-
ommended that the manuscript would best
serve readers if it were divided in two, allowing
the authors to create two more focused papers.
We feel that the final accepted versions offer
two unique ways of understanding how female
responsive design pedagogy can create more
inclusive experiences.
In the last of our series of papers on exclu-
sion, Priscila Arantes provides a concise review
that draws together artists’ challenges to tradi-
tional museum curatorship in Brazil through
400 FROM THE EDITOR: Challenging Exclusion and Museum Doctrine
the disruptive practice of archival curatorship.
She illustrates the many ways that archives are a
function of power, and how critique of those
power relationships can reshape the under-
standing of history. Her critical approach chal-
lenges museums to rethink the classification of
work and how collecting practices might find
more utility by embracing new notions of what
constitutes a work held in a collection.
In our book review, we learn about Maura
Reilly’s recent publication on ethics and acti-
vism in curatorship, something that clearly
addresses how we approach exclusion and reflect
on the role of museum practitioners in overcom-
ing troubled histories that exclude or suppress
voice. In parallel, the exhibition review that
focuses on our unseen arctic that is witnessing
radical trophic change, an attempt by OMSI, a
US museum that attempts to bring into light a
part of our world that may be excluded from
day-to-day awareness, but is a bell-weather for
environmental change that can no longer be
ignored.
As the Lego diorama on our cover suggests,
museum professionals can challenge the status
quo to support an engaged citizenry. Good
museum work is not defined by budget, it is
defined be ingenuity and the willingness to
redefine what can be known. END