In this post we reflect on what motivates our shared interest in the emotionally laden elements of museum work – where did the emotion come from?
Jennie’s arrival
It was the emotion that got me in the end. More specifically, the acute feelings I experienced when working as a curator at a regional museum. As is common across the sector, there was a backlog of items requiring improved documentation. With annual ‘key performance indicator’ appraisals calculating percentages of items catalogued, the enormity of this task translated into strong feelings of potential overload. By percentages alone, I calculated it could take me several professional lifetimes to complete. Such emotions risked overwhelming the joy in what had already been achieved and what was yet possible. On emotions alone, I realised this was not the role for me.
Emotions of, what in different contexts have been called, “a growing sense of too muchness” (Chin 2016, 7) are ones I would encounter again a decade later. This time researching, with Sharon Macdonald and Harald Fredheim, the theme of “profusion” on a large, interdisciplinary heritage project. I was tasked with looking at how people in their own homes and professionals in museums manage the proliferation of material (and increasingly digital) ‘stuff’ of late 21st century life. Those taking part in the research articulated emotional responses that resonated strongly with my earlier experience. As we recounted in the project book, we learnt how “acquiring more things is also an emotive matter. So, too, is trying to manage the things one owns” (p. 206). Feelings of “overload”, potential “burden”, finding it “emotionally tiring”, or even language of “doom” (recounted in Chapter 13) associated with managing vast quantities of things, and further choice about what yet could be acquired, revealed the complex emotional dimensions of selecting what to keep for the future.
This research also opened my eyes to a wider spectrum of emotions associated with managing tangible cultural heritage, whether that be in domestic or institutional settings. For example, the joy or even love of working with specific kinds of object and using these to tell new stories in new ways; the uncertainty of making the ‘right’ decisions of what and what not to keep for future generations; or the deeply felt responsibility of honouring past decisions and acts of care. When speaking to professional declutterers, I learnt of how emotional and practical elements of supporting people are entangled in how they approach, as we discussed in the book, “curating loss” (p.186) (or selective holding onto and letting go of things). The research thus revealed how emotions characterise curating profusion, yet tend to be little remarked upon in day-to-day discussion, emerging through these kinds of focused research probings. I sometimes mused, might this be because emotions, themselves, are considered an excess (or profusion) requiring purging as part of wider strategies or “attempts at containment” for managing it all (p. 213)? Yet, the emotions never really left. I now find myself at the start of a conversation with Anna and others around emotions in museum work aiming to better identify, value, support, and care for (and indeed care through?) this element of museum work.
Anna’s arrival
I arrived at the topic of emotionally laden work in the museum and heritage sector through a series of research projects on the topic of climate change. I was lucky enough to interview some heritage professionals in the UK and in the pacific island nation of Kiribati, whose jobs in the sector had prompted them to reflect upon the topic for different reasons. Both research projects were collaborative, working with other academics and organisations including Senior Lecturer in Media and documentary film maker, Sara Penrhyn Jones (Bath Spa University). Although I always knew that climate change is a profoundly emotive subject, it was while watching Sara’s film (shot in Kiribati) that I began to understand more about what is at stake when we talk about the relationship between climate change and heritage. This is a profound subject that evokes feelings of loss but also hope. In my own interviews, it became clear that for some (not all) there was anxiety and frustration around a perceived lack of progress in different organisations, the topic just felt too big. This prompted thinking about how prepared we are as heritage professionals to facilitate understandings of climate change with audiences. Are we emotionally ready? How does climate change challenge what museum and heritage practitioners do and how they do it? What kind of support do we need to do this work justice? Hence my interest in this topic started to form.
