Case Study Two, Bricks and Mortar

Case study two takes forward the ideas produced by CurioUS and the Volunteer Events Team and further investigates how power performs in co-curation with community participants when the project is not on site of a museum. The case focuses on how the museum professional and the community participant experience power when non-selective curation in its infancy is applied and there is greater transparency of processes from the start. The research used a combination of auto-ethnographic observations which lay out backstage attempts to censor participant stories, followed by an analysis of questionnaires (n11/15) and interviews (n10/15) with the participants that present the front of stage perspective, as felt by them. It examines the binary positionings of Us and Them as found in the language participants use to describe their experience, which differs wildly from the auto-ethnographic observations. The observations presented here highlight the gaps and the incongruences of power operating in intercultural negotiations that are albeit perhaps subconscious and somewhat dispositional; they are coercive and symbolically violent in their othering and censoring actions. This phenomenon ultimately shows that reputational fear, which is also discussed as a finding in case study four, is disallowing missions of openness