ABSTRACT
The museum’s ‘gift’ of engagement and participation can thus too easily take the form of what economic anthropologist Raymond Firth astutely called ‘indebtedness engineering’. Museums avoid the discomfort of actual partnership through something else: co-option. It is the very ambiguity of participation, citizenship, empowerment and partnership that have made them vulnerable to coercion so as to meet with institutional agendas. A partnership model informed by critical development theory must inevitably confront the structural, political, economic, social and cultural causes of social injustice, guided by principles of solidarity and challenging unequal power structures. The museum collaborates with people who are experiencing social vulnerability, exclusion, lack of understanding, personal downturns and stigmatisation. Through the assistance of the museum, adult care leavers read their own child records for the first time in the States’ archives, made possible through the partnership with the museum.
