Constructing and communicating equality

The spaces of the museum have often been characterized, within cultural and sociological analyses, as means through which social inequalities have been constituted, reproduced, reinforced. The hierarchical arrangement of objects, the presentation of partial and biased histories, the marked absence of (certain forms of) cultural difference have been understood as technologies through which museums have contributed to wider social processes of othering, dis-empowerment and oppression.¹ Recently, however, it is possible to detect a growing confidence among cultural practitioners in articulating goals which might be seen to challenge these perspectives. Against a backdrop of increasing professional concern, internationally, for issues such as the representation of diversity and the inclusion of previously marginalized constituencies, there can also be seen a growing number of specialist museums whose primary purpose and rationale is explicitly linked to the combating of various manifestations and causes of social inequity.² These museums’ socially driven goals are, of course, immensely varied, contingent upon localized, socio-political imperatives, but many are framed by the growing influence of broader, pluralist discourses. These goals may be addressed through a number of means – work with schools and communities, events programmes, research and advocacy – but many seek to use their exhibitions to communicate to audiences specific ideas predicated upon concepts of equality and human rights. It might be argued that museum spaces are being reinvented and, for some, becoming endowed with the potential to effect positive social change – in particular, to promote equality through the combating of prejudices, the reversal of processes of othering and the engendering of pluralist, democratic values.