ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates one of the socio-technical processes that staff use to navigate the structures of social media and the museum; ‘translation’. It exposes how the norms and habits associated with the Open Museum (OM) staff’s social inclusion work which forms an ‘infrastructure’ is negotiated and translated by staff to the context of social media. Propelled by COVID-19, some OM staff were eager to invest in social media use: the practices observed illuminate some of the ways that other museum staff might attempt to translate these norms of social inclusion work by leveraging and working around the limits and potentials of social media platforms. Drawing on three mini case studies (the Myseum (Canada), an anonymous museum of migration, and the National Museum of the American Indian (US)), the chapter further illustrates how these norms might be translated in different ways according to very different institutional contexts, providing useful insights for practitioners in the field. The observations made in this chapter suggest the importance of museum staff’s experimentation, their ability to mindfully leverage social media affordances to recreate the dimensions that support their social inclusion work, and their ability to listen to their users.
