ABSTRACT
Handing the plate of cake to the museum's senior manager, he proceeded to direct the mixed group of workshop participants into positions, so that the staff members were holding out the plate of cake. The museum here is firmly in the centre, holding the cake, displaying an almost nineteenth-century view of a passive subject, outside the institution, awaiting improvement. Despite the best of intentions, the imposition of the institutions coercive authority places people in the position of being co-opted into supporting the museum's goals, while silencing any potential resistance or opposition. Collective Conversations had the potential to 'act as a focalising, capable of drawing together diverse, even antagonistic constituencies'. According to Chantal Mouffe, conceptually fraught with dangers because it produces the opposite effect, exacerbating society's antagonistic potential. Mouffe maintains that an idealized, consensual form of democracy permeates such contact zone work, promoting a view that, by seeking to avoid conflict, suppresses the politics of the process.
