From Language to Languaging: From Site of Power to Sites of Openness

This section will look at what museums are doing to change dispositional representations of Us and Them and how other disciplines, such as theatre, community arts and pedagogy, could help in this transformation. This chapter will take in how power performs in curated cultural production and why this is a sensitive business. It will also track how hooks’ (1989. Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 36, 15–23. JSTOR.) radical openness is practised in community arts but is still to be fully adopted within institutions such as museums. Furthermore, as a literature review it will look at how a process of ‘languaging’ (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004, Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field. SAGE.) can be seen in the activism of theatre, which could be helpful to museums to transform into radically open spaces for co-curation. When working with participants who have had difficulty in accessing their cultural rights and spaces in which to articulate ‘their own stories’, this is particularly important. The arts have a unique ability to develop a dialogue between individuals as they work together to create what Nina Simon (2010, The Participatory Museum. Museum 2.0.) in The Participatory Museum describes ‘shared goals’. The aim here is to expressly share the same objective in the project, be a community and be able to co-produce or participate in an expert-assisted exercise.