What might be gained or lost by museums expressing a moral or ethical position on divisive contemporary topics?

Recent years have seen increasing debate within the cultural sector and the field of museum studies around the ethical challenges bound up in museums' engagement with contemporary social issues (Sandell 2007 and 2017; Marstine 2017) with growing pressure on museum practitioners to declare an institutional position on moral questions and topics. Despite this, there is little in-depth grounded research to understand the implications of this significant shift in museum thinking and practice.
Drawing on political science, media studies, psychology and sociology, the research aims to explore why, how and what happens when museums express a moral or ethical position on a controversial contemporary topic. The project will generate new insights around which interpretive strategies can shift visitor/public opinion, help to build consensus around an issue and/or bring communities together, examining the reasons, methods and resources museums can use to negotiate and engage in what Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd term 'activist practice' (Sandell and Dodd 2010). My research addresses the following research questions:
1. Why might museums develop a moral or ethical position on a controversial topic?
How are perceptions of museums as trusted and 'safe' spaces challenged or reconfigured by their expression of a moral position on contested topics?
2. What interpretive strategies can be deployed in this newly emerging field of practice?
How, for example, do museums avoid preaching and yet get their message across?
3. What happens when museums express a moral or ethical standpoint on a topic?
In particular, how are visitor experiences, perceptions and attitudes shaped by their engagement with the museum?
4. What are the implications for museum leaders and practitioners of more explicit engagement with contentious political and social issues?
My project builds on research into museum ethics and socially engaged and activist museum thinking and practice. With a strong focus on museum practice, it seeks to generate insights that can not only contribute to the academy but also enrich, inform, support and challenge practice within the international cultural sector.
The significance of the proposed research (intellectual, practical, etc.)
Following the Brexit referendum, media debate around divisions within the UK dominated. The discourse was increasingly about difference, not along party political lines, but ideological positions. The issue of Fake News is pervasive. Recently political norms, our approach to human rights, and also the ways in which we develop and discuss opinions, have shifted. My research is particularly helpful to and relevant for the museum sector now as it negotiates its roles and practice in this context.
During this shift both in politics and in how the public learns, decides and takes sides, museums have held tight as places that people trust (Janes in Janet Marstine 2011: 67). Many museum leaders feel that this trust is dependent on museums being perceived as neutral. However, this has been increasingly challenged. I want to build on the work being done in the field of museum ethics and specifically 'activist museum practice' (Sandell and Dodd 2010).
I will look at the practical and theoretical aspects of my subject from both political and sociological contexts. 'Museums themselves', Sandell writes, 'cannot operate as if separate from the inequalities that exist within the communities they aim to engage...Rather, museums have a responsibility to construct such narratives out of an understanding of their significance to the contemporary political and social world within which they will be encountered.' (Sandell, 2017: 142-3). As well as aiming to strengthen museology to the fields of sociology and politics, my research would draw on sociological approaches that understand museums as part of a broader mediasca