We were pleased to take part in the ‘Care-ful’ Museums Conference held at Nottingham Trent University on 29th June 2023. Our presentation: Taking care of the workers: understanding museum and heritage professionals’ emotionally laden work, was a brief summary of our thoughts so far. We considered how emotion work has featured in writing about the museum and related sectors and chose to focus, given the conference theme, on how emotional labour and the topic of ‘care’ intersect. While discussion around care is flourishing within and beyond museums, we felt the need to approach ‘care’ critically. Is emotional labour always, or straight-forwardly, caring work? Perhaps this an assumption, and one that deserves further investigating? Partly, the questions we raised at the conference were guided by our shared interest in the language that those working in the sector use to describe what they do, and how this fits (or doesn’t) with understandings of ‘care’. If museum workers do not ‘care’ or perform ‘care’ how does this impact the ways that they negotiate their roles?
The conference was a thought-provoking day with speakers from both academia and the museum profession. Many of the speakers talked about care in relation to the more public facing aspects of museum work such as outreach and community engagement, sharing insights into what it’s like to ‘care’ in different contexts and how institutional and wider cultural expectations, ways of working and reputations sometimes hinder or are structures to be ‘worked around’. The final speaker Esme Ward, Manchester Museum, talked about recent developments at the museum (you can read more in this newspaper article) and considered what it would mean if we considered care as an organising principle. This is a question shared with the kinds of literatures we have found really helpful for shaping our thinking so far, including this book by Nuala Morse which we have included in our websites reading list.
While a really invigorating conference which helped us to better appreciate the hopes, realities, and building blocks for museums seeking to become more ‘care-ful’, we also left Nottingham with avenues we see as needing exploration. What kinds of emotion work occur beyond community engagement and public outreach? How can we better support a wide spectrum of emotionality in museum work? Are there – or should there be – limits to the kinds of care and/or emotional labour that museums as institutions do? We certainly do not have any answers to such questions but are excited to continue the conversation.
Anna and Jennie