Block 1. Museums as a place (for) of action and feeling

The workshop will explore the idea that museums have ethical possibilities and responsibilities to harness and direct their capacities for social good.

“Leveling hierarchies, challenging assumptions, countering erasure, promoting the margins over the center, the minority over the majority, inspiring intelligent debate, disseminating new knowledge, and encouraging strategies of resistance.”

As support for the concept of the museum as a purposeful force for change has grown, we have also seen an emerging and strident backlash from some quarters—an attempt to discredit or undermine this approach to museum thinking and practice—to position it as marginal or destructive or to suggest that it is biased or partisan.

Acknowledging that this field of work is emerging, nascent, and often challenging, this workshop explores the steps, sometimes small scale and tentative, that museum practitioners of all kinds can take—whatever context they are working in—to support their organizations to work ethically and in more socially purposeful and impactful ways.

Professor Suzanne MacLeod is Co-Director of RCMG and Professor of Museum Studies and has worked with RCMG on a number of key projects since 2013. She plays a leading role in shaping the Centre’s research agenda and priorities. Her research explores contemporary museum design, with a particular focus on design methodologies and the acknowledgment of the potential of design in creating inclusive environments which foster relationships and equality and enable full lives.

Subhadra Das is a researcher and writer who looks at the relationship between science and society. She specializes in the history and philosophy of science, particularly the history of scientific racism and eugenics, and what those histories mean for our lives today.

Dr Sarah Plumb joined RCMG in 2016 and became a Senior Research Associate in 2019. Her research is particularly focused on collaborators' experiences of socially engaged practice and the arising ethical implications of collaborations between museums and communities. Prior to joining the University of Leicester Sarah worked as a museum and gallery educator.

As the most ancient carrier of culture, food can become a means of communication and a good reason for reflection. The very architecture of the dinner—with its space divided into multisensory taste laboratories—allows all guests to engage in the process of communication. In the sound lab, they will be able to taste sound through crunchy and fizzy foods; form and taste are crucially important in the tactile one; the inclusive lab presents each plate as an image of the common and universal in its diversity and a certain reason for interaction; and in the laboratory of interdisciplinarity and connection, new tastes are born at the intersection of the most diverse aspects of taste and more.

The artistic narrative continues through the ceramics that Yulia Levin created especially for the event. With the shape of the dishes determined by the overall concept of the dinner, Yulia rethinks the very idea of ​​manual labor and sensory experience, revealing yet another aspect of symbolic involvement in the process. A guide map created for the dinner is designed to help guests navigate through the novel environment while searching for new (taste and sound) combinations.

The event is timed to coincide with the publication by Garage of the Russian translation of the book The Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary Perspective on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space—a collection of papers on understanding the meaning of tactile, auditory, spatial, olfactory, and gustatory sensory experience in museums of the present and future.

The discussion will be moderated by the scientific editor of the book, Nikita Bolshakov, candidate of sociology, senior lecturer at the Department of Sociological Research Methods at National Research University – Higher School of Economics, and senior researcher at HSE’s International Laboratory for Social Integration Research. He also curates accessibility and inclusion programs at the Museum of Cryptography.

The speakers will be announced at a later date.