Making Museum Professionals, 1850-the present

In the museum sector today, many organisations are campaigning for fairer recruitment and career structures. In the UK, Museum Detox highlights the 'systems of inequality' facing people of colour, while Fair Museum Jobs campaign for museum recruitment based on 'fairness, transparency, equity and inclusivity'. This new network will support and develop such campaigns by investigating the historical roots of the museum professions and the structures that supported them, from the birth of the modern museum (c. 1850) to the present day. It asks how a variety of museum professions came into being, and how they acted to produce particular competences and ways of working. It considers how they reflected and produced hierarchies, especially around race, class, gender, sexuality and disability, and how such hierarchies were challenged and negotiated by those excluded and disempowered by museums. The project is based on the principle that modern museums developed and are developing in an increasingly globalised world, and aims to investigate professional development transnationally, recognising that people, training methods and standards were all highly mobile. It understands museums both as part of colonising Western scholarship, and as sites of potential resistance and social justice. Critically, the network also seeks to develop productive links between academics and museum professionals, creating spaces, practices and outputs for dialogue between past, present and future, and to conceptualise historical practice as a tool to improve accessible professionalisation today.
The network will have three strands: 1) it will think about who is included and excluded by barriers to museum work and professional structures. This means understanding boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability, and how they have been created and maintained, and considering distinctions between amateur and professional, and 'insider' and 'outsider'; 2) it will consider how museum careers have and continue to play out within museums: we will analyse training, promotion, the range of distinct roles open to museum staff, occupational organisations, and the hierarchies between different kinds of professional in the museum, including the curator, designer, conservator, educator and volunteer; 3) it will investigate the effects of transnational forces on museum professionals, including colonialism, 'development' and war: we will consider professionals' mobility (willing or unwilling), networks of patronage and influence, locations for training and transnational bodies, e.g International Council of Museums (ICOM; est. 1946).
The network will support the development of deep, transnational historical scholarship through three international workshops and a special issue journal. It will also produce and disseminate a set of tools through which the museum sector can campaign against barriers to accessible professionalisation. A central network aim is to inform collective ways of working across HE and the museum sector: the workshops will seek to move beyond the delivery of a series of formal papers, prioritising practical engagement with source material and data from historic and contemporary museums, and shared writing and output production. The network is committed to the development and contribution of emerging and early career researchers and practitioners, and marginalised voices from the museum sector, and aims to democratise the process of research itself by making sure a wider range of voices are heard. Based on ongoing project evaluation, co-written outputs will consider the methods, benefits and challenges of collaboration between historians and museum practitioners, and the ways in which historical methods can be used to understand the museum professions and professionalisation. The network aims to offer a model for a scholarly but campaigning understanding of the museum as a historically produced but contemporaneously responsive instititions.