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Helen Graham, "Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s Affective Work" (UCL Press, 2024)
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A
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B
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Helen Graham, who's the author of Deconstituting Participation's Effective Work. So welcome to the podcast.
- [02:08]
C
Thank you so much.
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B
This is a fascinating and incredibly well timed book. Actually, as we sort of look around the world, not just in the UK but kind of globally of museums, there are really big questions about how these kind of Hugely important and significant institutions are going to be sustainable, how they might kind of attract or speak to audiences and I guess big kind of questions about what they're their futures might be. And the book kind of grapples with all of those big topics. And I guess the place to start is to think a bit about what got you interested in museums. Both, I guess, as a kind of academic study in them and author writing about them, but also, I guess as a kind of curator, museum worker, yourself.
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C
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I used to work in museums and learning and access teams. And since I've started working in universities and teaching museum and heritage studies, I've continued to work with museums. So museums have really been where I found myself. I started out doing things like adult learning and access. So this involved work such as running events and programs around access for disabled people, or perhaps working with refugee and asylum seekers. But as the discourse shifted in the 2000s, I became increasingly involved in museums as a facilitator of participation, by which I mean, you know, working with people who aren't employed by the museum to maybe be involved in exhibition making or collecting or events programming. So in a sense, my work kind of moved while I was working in museums from doing the type of access and inclusion initiatives where there was absolutely no expectation that those being involved would have any control really over their inclusion, and which as a result was quite an arm's length activity, emotionally speaking, to participation, which I found is definitely not an arm's length work like emotionally speaking. So, in essence, the book started out as an investigation into why participation in museums was so difficult, I. E. Sort of painful, conflictual upsetting. And documenting these difficulties really is a very big theme of both the academic and practice literature on museums and participation. But also these difficulties were an absolutely undeniable feature of my experience of facilitating participation in museums as well. But as I wrote the book, which I definitely saw as a kind of investigation in its own right, I realised that I might best address that wider difficulty by understanding better my own reactions and how I really kept finding myself over and over again in the same position, somewhat righteously raising my hand wherever the question who's not here? Is asked in a museum context. I really wanted to understand this reflex, how it linked ideas with affect. But also I became really interested in how writing the book itself could help me retrain that reflex and make way for a richer range of political possibilities other than that of just simply continually offering participation up as a means of institutional reform.
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B
Yeah, because the book has got quite a lot of Those reflections actually on your own practice and experience, kind of interwoven really, with both, I guess, kind of practical questions from museums, but also the kind of broader museum studies debates. And I mean, you mentioned a kind of couple of key terms already, things like access, inclusion, but then this kind of big kind of core word participation. And you sort of alluded, I think, already, to the idea that it's a kind of contested, struggled over kind of territory, and it means different things to different people, different institutions. And I'm wondering if you give a kind of flavor of what the term means, maybe a kind of brief history almost of how it's played out in museums practice.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. So by participation I mean, and I think this meaning has got a lot of currency, the involvement of those people who aren't employed by the museum, in the museum, in taking on museum work, whether that's related to exhibitions, interpretation of other kinds, maybe collecting processes or programming, so kind of organising events. So it is that kind of active involvement in an element of museum work by people who are not employed by the institution. But the word participation is very widely used and often used in quite a loose way to mean any kind of involvement. And this looseness has led a number of people to turn away from the use of the word participation to other terms like co creation, co production, or perhaps more explicitly politicized terms like constituent or solidarity. One of the things I came to want to insist on in this book was to link participation to its political genealogy and direct democracy. So I guess to think of it in terms of representational democracy, if that means electing or delegating authority to make decisions. Direct democracy is being involved directly yourself within decisions that affect your lives. So directness is a feature of anarchism. And commons based or other kinds of peer governance is sometimes called participatory democracy. So it's characterised by becoming mutually accountable, being open to working things through with other people. It requires being open to being affected and changed by those processes. It's also based in a political ontology which thinks of scale not in terms of scaling up and then rolling out in the way that traditional policy logics work, but as scaling out, you know, thinking horizontally, as network or federated initiatives. And epistemically, participation is motivated more by singularity and particularity rather than the kind of knowledge claims that are based in, for example, representational sampling. So what I was hoping, really, is that there's a usefulness in insisting on this genealogy and perhaps deliberately hardening its boundaries slightly. So I recognize I might be drawing boundaries around the term participation in a very active and perhaps a stronger sense than other people would recognize. But my reasons for doing that and really wanting to link it to direct democracy is because having that understanding of what participation is is enormously helpful. If you're trying to explain why adding participation to museums has been so difficult.
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B
The other thing, in terms of, I guess, like, definitions, and this might sound like a quite strange question, is the museum. And you mentioned, you know, participation being added to museums can be difficult. But actually thinking about, like, what a museum even is is quite difficult. And I guess listeners will have different visions of whether it's, you know, a quite traditional, you know, neoclassical building that's a couple of hundred years old. But actually, you know, there's all different sorts of institutions that fall under that umbrella. And I suppose, again, you know, just as participation has been a site for kind of struggle and change, the idea of what a museum is has got a similar kind of kind of history. And it'd be interesting to hear, I guess, kind of what your take on the definition is, but also why kind of having a definition of museums and thinking about what a museum is matters to the book, too.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I do think the question of what is a museum really is always the question. There's a kind of way in which maybe museums are precisely an active conversation about what museums are. They're kind of constituted in a way, by this ongoing tussle over what they are, what their nature is. So something quite meta about what a museum is. It's kind of constantly engaged with its own existential question, in a way. So, for example, the International Council of Museums has a museum definition which is negotiated and adapted and kind of updated every so many years. And the most recent ICOM definition, as I explore in the book, did come out of a period of significant disagreement over an earlier draft. And that disagreement obviously indicates that there was something at stake. There was some active disagreement, and there certainly were certain kind of concepts, potentially a shift away from universality and plurality that I think was at stake within that particular tussle over the definition in that time. So this is between 2018 and 2022. But what you can see and what I've noticed by looking at all of those museum definitions since the 1970s is a remarkable consistency of ideological formulation. So, in essence, there's an element which is about museums conserving objects for future generations. There's an element of museums making objects accessible through being open to the public, being available to everybody in some way. There's an emphasis increasingly and this is like, phased in over time, over the last 40, 50 years on representativeness or inclusion and diversity. And there's been for a while now, I think, pretty much since the 1970s, some sense that museums are actors within the world. So they're shaping the world, being impactful on people and places in some way. So while museums themselves, in their lived variety, are kind of doing many different things, you know, for sure, like that formulation that I've just kind of drawn some very, like, big, bold lines underneath. Don't. It doesn't describe everything that museums are. But I have come to think that it's useful to recognize that there's an ideological formulation of this type available to be mobilize within museum work at any given time. And it's that kind of ideological formulation that I've named Museum Constitution.
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B
Yeah, I was particularly kind of intrigued by that, as you say, ideological formulation, because that formulation, I guess, kind of does stuff in the world, not just actually in the world of kind of museums and institutions, but actually the kind of world more generally. And again, you've sort of alluded to this already, but it's full of, it seems, kind of contradictions. So on the one hand, you know, and you've sort of mentioned this already, museums have got this role of, you know, we. We have to like, literally, like preserve, curate, maintain a collection. You know, they might have all kinds of different scientists or, you know, kind of PhD qualified experts, but on the other hand, they're there to be as kind of broad and inclusive and bring as many people in to whether it's engaging with the collection or like, literally through the doors, in some cases, to buy tickets and pay for the upkeep of the building and institution, too. And those contradictions, I guess, on the one hand, make them fascinating places to kind of study, but also maybe make them quite sort of draining to be part of. And one of the things you do quite early on in the book is talk about the effective experience of living through a museum constitution. How then, I guess, does the kind of museum constitution sort of manifest in terms of both being a worker and, you know, it's maybe kind of contradictory demands, too.
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C
Yeah, I mean, that's what I really wanted to get at with calling it Museum Constitution and thinking of it as being made up of both ideas and how ideas are connected, but also affect, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a second about what that means. But part of what makes Museum Constitution alive and dynamic is exactly, as you say, some of its deficits and contradict well, tensions and some of its imaginative dimensions. So it's kind of got these really big claims that are in themselves never achievable and act as kind of constitutive deficits that need constant effort from staff. So words that signal this in, say, mission statements or code of ethics are things like forever permanent, human rights, even universal surveys, transformative impact words such as those including inclusion and being representative as well. But these claims are always also intentioned. So the obvious one is between conservation and access. Where traditionally the idea of conservation has required removing objects from life, away from people, but there's also a requirement to precisely make those objects available to people. And then there's also these really expansive constituencies that really can only be imagined. So whether that's humanity at a UNESCO level or in many museums, there's some kind of evocation of an abstract constituency which could be seen as everyone, the public, future generations. But crucially, all of these deficits, tensions and abstract constituencies have a political effect, which is to generate a requirement for a governance relationship of acting on behalf of these, imagining imagined constituencies and balancing out those interests. So I sort of see it as a kind of ideological formulation that is for. That has a specific political effect in terms of on behalf of governance. And I think what's. Yeah, as you say, what I think I wanted to really explore is how that ideological formulation isn't just already existing. I mean, it is written down in documents, so I can point to it, and I've been able to cite those documents. There are those elements of the formulation expressed on the page. But what makes it work, like what makes it alive, is precisely people having an investment in those claims, different elements of them. And in museums, particularly large museums, different elements of that ideological formulation are distributed to different members of staff to steward. And in a sense, there's an ongoing argument or an ongoing, you know, collegiate dispute over exactly where the line over those things should be drawn. So in very practical terms, I've often been in discussion as a learning and access member of staff, with people in the, you know, curatorial and conservation teams around that question of, you know, conserving objects and access requirements. In a sense, our work, like the work of the museum, through our work, was to negotiate where that line should be between those grand intentions. So in a sense, it is care and desire to animate a certain part of that constitution which also activates it and keeps it going. So I think that's really. That's why I was so interested in linking. It's not simply ideas, but also affect as Well.
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B
I guess one of the issues, thinking about the productive contradictions and tensions in that sense of Museum Constitution is when an idea like participation leads either to staff members saying, well, there's nothing we can do here, you know, these institutions that maybe kind of balance you've been talking about between different types of orientation towards the institution, when one of those kind of sides says, yeah, but if we start doing that thing, then the museum can't possibly carry on existing. Or I guess, you know, when other members of staff might say, this is great, you know, we should change completely, and then actually nothing happens. And the middle book, the middle section of the book, I guess, is somewhat of your reflections on reaching a point where you were thinking about strategies for kind of dealing with these tensions. I'm interested to get your reflections, I guess, on how you navigate some of those strategies, intentions, before we get into these, I suppose, kind of bigger questions about, well, what do museums need to do to change?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I guess what I was really keen to do, and I've touched on this already by my particular intention to tie the word participation to a political genealogy and direct democracy, is to really underline that why participation is difficult in relationship to what I've called Museum Constitution, is because they really have two different and contradictory political logics of legitimacy. And I wanted to really form this up abstractly enough that it was possible to say clearly, which obviously means, you know, actively abstracting that thought. But I felt that it was useful in part because knowing that is helpful in really practical ways. So an example I always think of, because it's happened to me so many times in terms of participatory practice in museums, is text editing for exhibitions. So participatory exhibitions will generally go through a process where the text is edited by somebody in the museum that could be a museum editor or someone who plays that role within the museum. And there's nothing untypical about this. Mostly museums will have an editorial process for its staff as well. But in a participatory context, text editing is a moment where these two logics of legitimacy really collide. So the group will have written that text, which is often about something quite personal or local or kind of community based. So something which they have a lot of personal investment in. And in their minds, they will have a really specific network of people, people they know or people people they know know, who they feel accountable to. So for them, this is a really personal and particular kind of audience. But then the museum will edit the text with its understanding of what will work for visitors based on years now of visitor research, with an evidence base of decades now in terms of how much people read and the length of text that's viable, the reading age, all of those things. So generally, the text is made more generic, details are edited out, it's usually cut in length, and the group feels disempowered and, you know, I think in the worst instances, fears the reaction of its own community to the exhibition. But the text editor is not in any simple sense wrong, which is often how it's interpreted, and I've certainly felt that in specific situations. But rather they're operating with an entirely consistent political logic, I. E. The one of Museum Constitution, this late liberal logic I've spoken about, of being accountable to the abstraction of everyone, all visitors in this kind of abstract constituency sense that I've spoken about, really thinking about access and that widest group of people who might come through the door. But the group, in feeling upset and worried, are also acting entirely consistently within a political logic of legitimacy, that of participation, where they feel accountable to specific groups of people. So I think this is what I really wanted to get at. I don't think being better at participation in is a question of a technical fix. We really have had enough toolkits. It really is a more fundamental political question. It's a question of governance, but as I go on to explore, it's also a question of political ontology as well. So the subtitle of the book is Participation's Effective Work, and I wanted to use that to describe how members of staff who are involved in participation become accountable to a group, in contrast to the requirements of accountability to the institution, which creates a certain kind of disinvestment in Museum Constitution and in activating Museum Constitution precisely because they're having to hold the costs, which is experience, personally, of the tension between these two incompatible political ideals. So this is where I was interested in feelings of disinvestment and whether they could be turned into a technique of detachment that is towards deconstituting Museum Constitution and towards what I ultimately call participatory worlding.
- [22:46]
B
It'd be great to hear a bit more about that kind of sense of participatory worlding, because one of the things that comes through quite strongly in the book is that it's a much more complicated relationship than, say, something like curators bad, participation officers good. And actually, one of the things you try and show with things like participatory worlding is the idea that institutions are being transformed. It's just they're being transformed in ways that maybe kind of surface the tensions you've been talking about which make certain practices more or less kind of viable. So, yeah, what is this kind of participatory worlding?
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C
Yeah, I guess one meaning of or one aspect I wanted to use participatory effective work to draw attention to is that sort of slackening of investment that happens in Museum Constitution when you've been drawn into participatory relations of accountability with specific people. So I felt this myself many times and increasingly that actually taking seriously the commitments that I was developing to groups I was working with made me feel less. My energies didn't rise, my hand didn't go up in the same way. I didn't feel like invested in the animation of Museum Constitution and in a way, institutional reform in the way that I used to. So that disinvestment is one element of what I wanted to use the phrase participation defective work for. And thinking about how feelings of disinvestment could be solidified into a technique of detachment where you actively step away from feeling that you have to raise your hand in those meetings where people ask who's not here? To create a bit more space for other things to happen. And so the other aspect of the use of participatory's effective work is precisely that by being involved in participatory processes, you open yourself up to new ways of organizing and new ways of being. So in that sense, participation isn't just a different politics to late liberalism sort of representational focus which I've drawn out in relationship to Museum Constitution. It also produces a different ontology, like it's a different way of being in the world. It's a different way of worlding. So in this I really wanted to connect museum studies or develop the connection. I'm not the first person to make this connection, but to develop the connection between museum studies and work on welding, but also in particular with participatory in action research, which I think has got a lot to say in a museum and heritage context about the politics of participation. So participatory welding draws on welding in the work of people like Donna Haraway, Karen Brad, Kathleen Stewart, where worlding is taking up a sort of ethical and political responsibility for how our ways of being make worlds like producing ourselves and others, but also things and time and space. So to relate that to the Museum Constitution, and this is very much drawing on Karen Barad's work, you could see Museum Constitution's ontology is based on the Newtonian ontology, where subject and object are understood as separately determinate. And pre given entities, so they exist in advance and they are relatively fixed and stable. Whereas Barad employs a relational ontology in which reality, so worlding is made through interactions and not between already existing entities, whether that's people or things, but rather are the means by which subjects and objects, time and space, and the boundaries between inside and out are produced. So for Berard, this is ethics. So worlding is ethics. It's a way of being responsible for being in the world in terms of what she calls, what they call the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are part. So ethics is therefore a matter of how to be present and how to be responsive. And that resonates very much to me with participatory practice. So much of what an ethics of participation is, is how to be in that group in a responsive way, open to the fact that what's happening there will change you and change what is possible. So in participation action research, I'll just give one example of this. There is a definitely a long term strand of work which sees participatory research as ontological. So just to give the example of Orlando Faust Border, who's worked in Columbia, he described the way in which participation action research induces the creation of its own field. So the key idea here is the field does not exist in. In advance to be studied, but is an act of creation through the relational processes of the research. So my concern in elaborating participatory worlding was to think what techniques might enable it. And this is where I came to modulating, which is really using affective theory of intensities to think about how you are within any given moment, but also crucially organizing. So I think quite particular ways about political design.
- [28:13]
B
I guess the later parts of the book think about this on a more sort of practice based level. And you mentioned organizing there it comes to a variety of other practice questions. I think there's maybe the tension that you've kind of alluded to a few times really manifests itself towards the end of the book where you're asking whether some of the big ideas that drive museum constitution can actually be kind of like rethought, reframed, can, can even be kept and given, I suppose the ontological ethical practice demands that you've been alluding to. It's maybe quite tricky to think about, well, could we still think of museums as kind of conserving? Can we still think of museums as neutrally represented? And I wonder, I guess, is there a sort of a way of rehabilitating Some of these kind of core, almost classical ideas from museums. Or do we need, I suppose, a kind of an entirely new museum constitution?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think museum constitution is highly problematic and very much running out of road. One of the things I try and do in that final chapter on organising is really take some of those concepts which are embedded within representational logics. Representational, both politically in the sense that they rely on delegated authority, but also representational epistemologically, in that they rely on, you know, concepts of being able to know a whole and then differentiate and then draw people into playing a representative role of their community or identity and showing how that structure cannot work in a participatory way. So I'm really clear that there's no. That to be interested in participation is to give up that liberal framework. So. And it really, I think, really, I would hope one of the main outcomes of the book is that some of the. That finding ourselves back in the same situation of participation, being experienced as highly problematic by those who are involved, might be saved if we recognize that kind of fundamental political tension between this representational, liberal logic, what I call museum constitution, and participation. So I was really interested in music in chapter seven of adding economic logics to the kind of definition of museum constitution and to notice the ways in which it is based in ideas of scarcity. So, not least that objects need to be protected from access and use. That is, there's a rival resource, it's a resource that could be lost or used up, that has to be protected. And also there is a limited resource of other kinds as well. So including the resource of institutional recognition, for example, that has to be distributed fairly. So, for example, the concern that you often hear that you can't work with the same group over and over again because you need to ensure that you are using the resources of the museum fairly across the demographics of any given city, for example. So in both cases there's a kind of scarcity logic at play. So I was quite interested in what would happen if we reframed that. So just to think about conserving for a moment, there's a kind of really powerful rhetoric that I've definitely been swept up in myself, where there's a kind of opposition between objects and people. And in a way, this isn't an accident. The museum constitution sort of sets this up and then asks different teams to take up different aspects of that position and then sort of prosecute those lines as part of sustaining the dynamic of what the museum is. So I go back to that example of, for example, touch tools for people who are blind and partially sighted, there was always a kind of very active sense that one team is being asked to do one thing, that is, to ensure that people who are blind and partially sighted have genuine and meaningful access to the collections. But another team have very much been given the responsibility to avoid touch of collections. And so then, everyday work is like negotiating what the specific line around any given object and any given workshop might be. But in a sense, this is like this Newtonian ontological logic that I spoke about, where objects are separate from the relations of production, use and existence, and their discreteness is their essence, and that's what needs to be conserved, and that conservation happens by removing them from these types of social relations. And I credit lots of conservators who work in museums who are writing about this at the moment. Really, we need to perhaps rethink what conserving means, because objects are often not meaningful unless they are fully connected to their purpose, which was generally being used for something. So the etymology of conserving contains the idea of not running out. And in museum context, this is generally conceived in terms of stabilising the materiality of the object. But of course, you can, using that etymology, link the material and the social. So in a way, what you might be wanting to achieve is not just not running out of, in a material sense, but not running out of meaning in a social sense. And so, in a sense, if you thought about it in this way, that opposition, that museum constitution nourishes between objects and people and actually between future generations and everyone now could be reimagined. And more than this, thinking about participatory governance, many objects are really a very deep and powerful interest to specific communities of people, and actually are only of general interest to others. So thinking of conservation in this way that is around use and active cultivation of its meaning would also displace this kind of on behalf of governance, which is baked into museum constitution. And, you know, in a sense, this tension between conservation access justifies precisely that kind of trustee and professional governance. A participatory governance approach would really see this as being perhaps delegated to communities of care that could actually generate that social relevance, as well as share it with a more wider group of people as well. So I think that's an example of how rethinking the meaning of conserving also changes the political potential in terms of governance and similarly like in terms of representation. So at the moment, there's a kind of sense that museums have to be representative and take responsibility for ensuring that there's an adequate diversity of representation. So in a sense they curate that diversity, they manifest it, and obviously are interested in a certain range of what might be acceptable to be said as part of that representational process. But what you might see, and I kind of explore this in chapter seven, is if you move to sort of really a self representation practice without the need for diversity to be curated by an overarching framework, then that would enable a wider range of involvement and activity. But I think really key, and this is really going to the core politics of how you might sustain horizontal and participatory governance is it's useful to minimise decision making and expand action, unleash energy and enable lots of activity, rather than requiring group consensus all the time, but where decisions are needed for them to be directly negotiated. But also key, and I think this is absolutely crucial in our current moment. There always needs to be proper processes such as restorative practice or restorative justice for managing conflict and harm. So the kind of vision that I'm outlining of much more agency and participatory action also does need negotiated frameworks, both for decision making and for dealing with conflicts.
- [36:43]
B
Thinking about, I suppose, the kind of possibilities and potential you've been talking about there and again, coming back to the effective elements and your own sort of career reflections that are in the book, I guess, are you kind of hopeful for museums in the current moment? One thing I was struck by, I think it's the kind of opening of the conclusion talks explicitly about the problem of kind of abolition and I guess the kind of end of these institutions, which is perhaps not a sign of hopefulness for the institution. But at the same time, I sort of suspect you wouldn't have written the book if you didn't think there was something to be saved in the museum.
- [37:29]
C
I don't think there's anything to be saved in museum constitution as a political formation, which is not the same thing as saying that some of the activities and intentions and relationships and practices that are going on in museums at the moment aren't highly significant and important. But I do think in order to enable those other types of activities to thrive, we do need to deconstitute that museum constitution that I've outlined. And I think in part because the continuity future it relies on just no longer exists because of the very same logics of extraction, exploitation, classification, hierarchicalization which characterized early museums. And this late liberal iteration is also under extreme pressure, both in terms of like, say, carbon and resource intensive approaches to conservation. But also actually these fundamental logics I've been speaking about of actual access, inclusion and representation. So in all these kind of ways, like the conditions of museums existence are sort of collapsing in on itself. So I think we're just at such a crucial moment for liberal institutions and liberal democracy, aren't we? I mean, it's just been, you know, it's acted as, for decades now as a kind of holding space which has defined what's acceptable and it's used conforming to that, you know, idea of what's acceptable, articulation as being a sort of passport to entry. But this is now under attack from the right. Obviously we can see this in terms of new authoritarianism in Trump's America, sort of thinking about what's happened at the Smithsonian in recent months. But I think, and this is really crucial, it's also under attack from the left, where activists are increasingly demanding trauma, informed facilitation of all public discursive spaces. So I do think a doubling down on the liberal logics of legitimacy is unlikely to work. I think what we probably need in place is facilitative approaches that can deal with conflict and harm. And I doubt that can be done the scaled up way. But what we probably do need to really deal with this political moment is a scaled out approach with spaces for dialogue that can be facilitated in restorative ways in lots and lots of different local places. So I think to return more directly to museums, I think there are many different approaches to like culture and heritage which are and will continue to spring up, which we use peer governance. I mean, there's long histories of this even in museums. And as my sort of exploration of the eco museum and community museum movements of the 70s and early 80s kind of indicates, and for some people, I guess they will try and use the word museum for some of these alternatives and reimaginations. But I guess my reflection on that, I've kind of going back to the idea of attachment, which is one of the strands of effects that I use within the book. I'm just interested in what it might be in the word museum that draws people out. Like what does it seem to promise? And I suppose partly I am wanting to detach from perhaps some of the things that that word might seem to promise, which includes within its etymology connotations of separation from the world. But in essence, I suppose the book is a response to how a certain class of museum worker, of which I've been one, is living some of those contradictories, contradictions of modernity, really. It's like in a really practical way, like through text editing and event organising and just having to work out who they are as they kind of are clashed up between these two different political ideals. And I suppose in the end, this book is a means of registering that living this join between late liberal institutionalism and participation is not personally sustainable. And therefore I don't think it's institutionally sustainable either. So, in terms of the future of museums, I suppose, at minimum, I hope that the worst of this unwitting clash of these two political logics might be ended. So we can't keep hoping to clash these political logics together, inviting participation into Museum Constitution, expecting different results. And that's really because participation is not just another word for engagement, it is a form of governance. And so it has to be thought of politically in those terms. And participation doesn't exist in the same world or reality as Museum Constitution. It's all about worlding differently. And that's precisely through exposing yourself directly.
- [41:56]
B
To others in terms of thinking about, I guess, that kind of making sense of the contradictions. In some ways, this book could represent a sort of moment of settlement that allows you to think about very different kind of projects. But at the same time, it strikes me the book leaves a lot of kind of future questions available for you to be thinking through, whether, you know, kind of empirically or theoretically. There's certainly, you know, a lot, you know, kind of of a future agenda set out in there. And I'm interested to know what you're, I guess, kind of working on next, whether something kind of flows from the book or whether you have got a different set of, I guess, kind of research interests that are sort of distinctive from it.
- [42:48]
C
Yeah, no, thanks. A great question. I think I haven't found it easy, I think, just to work out what's next. In a way, it feels like this has been making sense of like 20 years of experiences and it felt extremely cathartic to do so. But I think the question that's really niggled at me is this one that we touched on in the last exchange around what this moment requires in terms of political discourse. And I suppose a clear sense from me that I don't think a liberal framework of kind of human rights logics which exclude in advance certain types of articulation, is going to cut it for the next phase of the kind of political conversation that we need. So I have been doing restorative practice and restorative justice training as a facilitator to try and understand how we might create spaces that can hold conflictual conversation in ways that also recognize that those conversations can, if not properly held, cause significant harm and can be experienced as trauma. So I think I'm really interested in. Yeah, I'm really interested in developing my facilitation practice and really thinking about, in practical terms, how do we create the kinds of spaces for political interaction that we need for our current moment?