Crafting museum social media for social inclusion work

Abstract:

Understanding how museums can contribute to the diverse needs of marginalised individuals through the social web is and will continue to be paramount, especially in our COVID-stricken world. Museum literature often espouses the potential of social media for social goals due to its ability to reach wider audiences and increase opportunities for participation and engagement that could benefit museum users. However, current research and practices tend to overlook a critical attention to the relationship between museum social media practices and the institution’s social inclusion role. For instance, common trends in museum literature suggest that museums over-market and broadcast rather than truly trying to engage their users online. Thus, this thesis attempts to provide insight into the intersections and disconnections between museum social inclusion work and social media use to inform practice in the field.

It asks one overarching question: (1) How can social media support the museum’s socially inclusive role to potentially challenge social exclusion and associated inequalities? This is underpinned by two additional questions: (2) How do structures (institutional and social platforms) shape how staff carry out social inclusion work through social media? (3) Which work processes enable staff to pursue social inclusion through social media? By employing a methodology that includes practice research and additional qualitative methods such as participant-observation, the study has investigated these questions by paying close attention to the everyday practices of staff in museums working at the forefront of social inclusion.

The PhD research from 2018-2021 is mainly based on one case study – the Open Museum, which belongs under the larger umbrella organisation of Glasgow Museums. The Open Museum has been heralded as leading social inclusion work and as such, served as a highly relevant case for investigating the research questions. Within the case study, close attention was paid to staff practices to investigate the processes and conditions that enable (dis)connections between social media and social inclusion work. The findings from the analysis of the main case study are contextualised with an additional series of seven interviews with social media professionals in Scotland and three diverse case examples: A museum of migration (Canada), the Myseum (Canada), and the National Museum of the American Indian (US). Through synthesising the findings from both the case study and case examples, key aspects of museum infrastructures that hinder and enable social media use for social inclusion work are identified. This includes, on the one hand, social and organisational structures, such as the distribution of responsibilities, the norms, and habitual practices of social inclusion work and on the other hand, technical structures in the form of social media limits and affordances. In turn, the thesis identifies three main processes that staff use to negotiate these structures of both museum and social media platforms, including ‘translation’, ‘repair’, and ‘tinkering’. These processes point to the skilled and contingent nature of museums’ social media practices for social inclusion initiatives as a form of craftwork and the need for organisational support in order for these socio-technical processes to fulfil their potential.