How do socially engaged staff manage their personal values and emotions within museum organisational cultures?

This research explores how socially engaged museum staff manage their personal values and emotions within their organisational cultures, with a view to identifying avenues for organisational change. Despite largescale sector campaigning for equality, representation, and redistribution of power, it is continuously difficult for traditional museums to enact internal change as bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions. This research questions the concept of the museum as an unchanging monolith and explores how organisational social justice change-making is advanced and impeded in the daily human interactions in the museum as a workplace. By exploring the experience of the individual in constructing and subverting organisational culture, this research aims to emphasise the importance of personal values and emotions to organising, and present pathways to more empathetic, responsive and just museums. As the sector and the society it impacts reaches this moment of urgency in the social justice movement, this research seeks to combat barriers to change and empower socially engaged practitioners to generate solid solutions in constrained conditions.

The research question, "How do socially engaged staff manage their personal values and emotions within museum organisational cultures?", explores the professional and emotional experiences of socially engaged museum staff as they balance their personal values with organisational norms and expectations. It includes the strategies they use to implement their values at work and how organisational cultures suppress, absorb and nurture these values. Some sub-questions are:
In what ways do museum staff negotiate space for their personal values and emotions within their organisations? How do they feel about this process?
What identities do socially engaged staff develop through negotiating their personal values and emotions with the organisation?
What traits do socially engaged staff foster in organisational cultures to facilitate social justice and change-making?

The project uses a feminist theoretical framework; privileging emotional knowledge, embodied experience and lived reality, deconstructing power structures and social norms, blurring the barrier between public and private spheres, and taking an activist, collectivist and optimistic outlook that is solution-oriented and forward-looking. It seeks to encourage an ethic of care in museum work and management, as well as employing this ethic itself in its approach to research as useful, positive and empowering for participants. Its focus on lived reality is enriched by drawing on the concept of the "peopled museum" and the Theory of Everyday Life, which address the agency of people working within hierarchical systems.

The project is divided into two phases: interviews with creative elements with c.20 socially engaged museum education and interpretation staff, and action research sets with a subset of c.10. Semi-structured, one-to-one interviews, stimulated by creative activities, will explore the emotional experiences of socially engaged museum staff. Conclusions drawn from analysis of the interview data will then be shared with the action research group, who will work together to identify and test realistic solutions and disruptions of oppressive organisational cultures. The action research group will meet in a series of workshops over several months to discuss and refine their ideas, ending with the production of a co-authored output, like a manifesto or toolkit, that can be shared with the sector to encourage practical change-making.