Taking Care of the Workers: Investigating the Use of Emotions in Museum Work

Abstract

In recent years museums and heritage sites have been encouraged to form deeper, more democratic and transparent relationships with their diverse publics, arguably requiring a different range of skills and ways of working which use workers’ emotions. However, the experience and use of emotions in this work is only just beginning to be discussed within the sector and in academic research, and there remains a limited understanding of the role of emotions in creating resilient and sustainable organisations. In this article we reflect on why worker emotions are a pressing concern for the sector today, briefly outlining how emotions have been discussed from different perspectives within museum and heritage studies literature. We also introduce a new research project seeking to explore what we see as the critical questions on emotions in museum work. By highlighting wide-ranging discussions relevant to the sector, our aim in this article is to encourage museum professionals to reflect on when, how, and why they might be using emotions in their own work.