Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network – New Books in Critical Theory
Host: New Books
Guest: Helen Graham, author of Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s Affective Work (UCL Press, 2024)
Date: January 16, 2026

Overview

This episode features a conversation between the host (B) and Helen Graham (C), focusing on Graham’s new book, Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s Affective Work. The episode tackles the increasingly fraught conversations in museum worlds around participation, sustainability, and institutional futures. Graham draws from personal experience as a museum worker and academic, exploring the emotional and political complexities of participation in museum practice, and what it means to reimagine museums beyond established liberal frameworks.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Helen Graham’s Journey and Motivation

• Background: Graham began in museum learning and access, particularly working with marginalized groups (e.g., refugees, disabled people) (02:56).
• She notes a shift from “arm’s length” inclusion activities to more immersive, participant-driven work—work that is unexpectedly emotionally intensive.
• The book emerges from Graham’s need to interrogate, and perhaps retrain, her habitual response to “who’s not here?” in museums:

  “I really wanted to understand this reflex, how it linked ideas with affect... and make way for a richer range of political possibilities other than just continually offering participation up as a means of institutional reform.” (04:37–05:08)

2. Definitions & Genealogies: Participation and the Museum

What is Participation?

• Participation, Graham insists, isn’t just any involvement, but specifically “the involvement of those people who aren’t employed by the museum, in taking on museum work...exhibitions, interpretation...collecting, programming.” (05:57–06:28)
• She’s wary of the term’s dilution and prefers to root it in participatory and direct democracy—the idea that people directly affected have direct agency and accountability.

  “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...having that understanding...is enormously helpful if you’re trying to explain why adding participation to museums has been so difficult.” (08:16–08:34)

What is a Museum?

• Museums, Graham argues, are in a constant state of negotiation over their purpose (“an active conversation about what museums are”) (09:29–09:40).
• She traces the ideological “museum constitution” across decades:
  • Conservation for future generations
  • Public accessibility
  • Inclusion and representativeness
  • Agency as societal actors
• Graham labels the persistent ideological formulation as “museum constitution,” noting it is mobilized at any time to serve particular ends (11:10–11:53).

3. Museum Constitution: Contradiction, Affect, and Tension

• Museums are fundamentally defined by their grand, often contradictory claims (preservation vs. access; universality vs. plurality), which generate “constitutive deficits”—perpetually unachievable goals demanding ongoing staff effort (13:34–14:35).
• These contradictions are lived and negotiated daily by museum workers, with affect—emotional investment and tension—as a “live wire” that animates the institution:

  “What makes it work...is precisely people having an investment in those claims...different elements of that ideological formulation are distributed to different members of staff to steward...” (16:06–16:34)

4. The Political Collision of Participation and Museum Constitution

• Participation (in Graham’s sense) and traditional museum governance are not merely different but fundamentally incompatible political projects:
  • Museum Constitution is grounded in liberal representational logic (“acting on behalf of everyone”).
  • Participation is grounded in direct, horizontal relations of accountability (“accountable to specific groups of people”).
• Graham explores a practical example:
  • Participatory exhibition text editing often pits staff (with their abstract responsibility to ‘the public’) against participant groups (with specific local accountabilities), resulting in hurt, tension, and alienation.

    “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.” (21:39–21:56)

• The “affective work” here means the toll on workers embodying both logics and the political possibility—through “detachment” or “disinvestment”—of stepping back from constantly trying to reconcile irreconcilable demands.

5. Participatory Worlding: Ethics and Ontology

• Graham borrows concepts from Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, etc., to describe “participatory worlding”—doing participation as a process of producing new subjectivities, communities, and realities (23:30–28:13).
  • This contrasts with museums’ Newtonian ontology (fixed entities, representational logics); participatory worlding means reality is produced through “relations,” not preexisting categories (25:40–26:21).
  • Key principle: “Worlding is ethics”—an active responsibility for what is made in and through practice.
  • Participatory worlding relies on “modulating” intensities of affect (tensions, investments) and on “organizing”—designing politics and relationships differently.

6. Rethinking Museum Fundamentals: Conservation, Representation, Governance

• Graham critiques attempts to simply “reform” museum constitution, arguing that the representational, scarcity-based, and on-behalf-of governance logics are fundamentally incompatible with true participation (29:23–30:33).
• Example: Conservation
  • Traditionally, museums see objects as discrete, preserved through separation—“conserving means stabilizing the materiality.”
  • Graham suggests “conserving” should also mean not running out of meaning—connecting material conservation to ongoing social relevance. (32:11–32:55)
• Example: Representation
  • Museums curate “diversity” by selecting who represents whom, reinforcing hierarchy.
  • Graham proposes true self-representation through peer or community governance, expanding action, minimizing top-down decision-making, and implementing restorative practices for conflict (35:04–36:07).

7. Institutional Futures, Affective Realities, and Political Possibility

• Graham is not optimistic about the future of “museum constitution” but sees potential in the practices, relationships, and energies that exist beneath or outside of it (37:29–37:50).
  • The logics sustaining traditional museums are “collapsing in on themselves”—environmentally, politically, ethically.
  • Sustainable futures require “a scaled-out approach...with spaces for dialogue...in restorative ways in lots and lots of different local places.” (38:53–39:09)
• She suggests that “participation is not just another word for engagement, it is a form of governance”—requiring an ontological and political break from traditional models (41:37–42:15).

8. What’s Next? Personal and Professional Reflections

• Graham is investing in restorative justice and facilitation, seeking practical methods for holding space for “conflictual conversation”:

  “I’ve been doing restorative practice and restorative justice training...how do we create the kinds of spaces for political interaction that we need for our current moment?” (42:48–end)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Participation:

  “Participation is motivated more by singularity and particularity rather than...knowledge claims...based in, for example, representational sampling.” (07:54–08:15)

• On Museum Constitution:

  “Museums are precisely an active conversation about what museums are...they’re kind of constituted, in a way, by this ongoing tussle.” (09:30–09:40)

• On Emotional Toll:

  “Our work, like the work of the museum, through our work, was to negotiate where that line should be between those grand intentions.” (16:50–17:04)

• On Governance Conflict:

  “In a participatory context, text editing is a moment where these two logics of legitimacy really collide.” (18:52–19:04)

• On Conservation Reimagined:

  “Perhaps 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.” (32:55–33:10)

• On Institutional (Un)sustainability:

  “Living this join between late liberal institutionalism and participation is not personally sustainable. And therefore I don’t think it’s institutionally sustainable either.” (41:31–41:49)

• On Participation as Governance:

  “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.” (42:14–42:24)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:56–05:08 – Helen Graham’s story and the emotional work of museum participation
• 05:57–08:34 – Defining “participation” in museums; its direct democratic roots
• 09:29–11:53 – The problem of “what is a museum?”; emergence of the “museum constitution”
• 13:34–17:09 – Contradictions, deficits, and affect in the museum workplace
• 18:22–22:46 – Participation vs. Museum Constitution: political and practical clashes
• 23:30–28:13 – Participatory worlding: ethics, ontology, and creating new realities
• 29:23–36:07 – Rethinking conservation, representation, and governance in participatory terms
• 37:29–41:49 – Institutional futures, affective sustainability, and the radical potential of deconstitution
• 42:48–end – Graham’s future directions: restorative justice and facilitating conflict

Tone & Language

The conversation is thoughtful, reflective, and often deeply personal, balancing intellectual critique with lived experience. Graham’s tone is both critical and generative—she urges a rethinking of museums not through minor reforms, but through a significant reimagining of the political, ethical, and affective work at their heart. The host draws out both the abstract and practical stakes of the book, grounding theory in concrete museum realities.

This summary covers the full arc and significance of Helen Graham’s arguments in the episode—valuable for anyone looking to understand not just the “crisis” of museums, but the deep emotional, political, and ontological challenges and futures of participation itself.