"People just need to feel important, like someone is listening": recognizing museums' community engagement programmes as spaces of care

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which spaces of care are produced within museums. In particular, this paper investigates community engagement, a relatively underexplored facet of museum practice in the UK. Community engagement is often understood as a way for museums to engage with those individuals, groups and communities who do not or cannot regularly visit museums. Goals for community engagement programmes range from the short-term, for example the creation of a body of knowledge around an object from a museum’s collection, through to the long-term, for example the cultivation of a relationship between local communities and the museums service. The paper draws upon a period of ethnographic research undertaken with Glasgow Museums – the city of Glasgow’s municipal museum service. I use the example of community engagement as a means of interrogating the spaces of care produced within museums. I argue that museums are ideal places within which to create caring spaces and yet clear problems arise when the caring that is done within museums is not recognised as such. I also argue that ideas about women’s ability to cultivate and sustain care relationships are reproduced in museum settings.