Postdoc, School of Communication and Culture

Editorial: Experiencing participation

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Recent outbursts of activist interventions in museums have put a spotlight on the difficult relationship of cultural spaces with activism as they aspire to be forums, sites for civil, social, and cultural participation (Black, 2005; Byrne, 2018; Janes &amp; Sandell, 2019; Pegno, 2021). On the one hand, museums want to be engaged and relevant, taking part in social dialogue as “agents of change” (Mouffe, 2016; Sandell, 2003). On the other, they often have complex relationships with the activists themselves, especially in the framework of participatory practices (Coffee, 2008; Lorente, 2015). This article focuses on the process of co-creation of an exhibition about the social history of AIDS at the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (the Mucem) in Marseille, France, and explores how this participatory project involving activists can help us better understand the challenges of museum activism. The core question this article addresses is: how did activists experience the co-creation participatory process, and what can the museum learn from it to inform their practice of museum activism?
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“Never enough, never perfect”: Participatory activist practice in the museum

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The crisis of democracy calls upon public art museums to reflect on what is expected from them as public spaces. This article investigates the art museum as an engaged political participant in its local surroundings and the neighborhood assembly as the platform of this participation. Through original interviews with museum professionals, the article examines three examples of museum-based neighborhood assemblies in different geographical contexts: the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain), Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Chile), and Whitechapel Gallery (UK). Drawing on political theory to analyze the horizontal, discursive, and performative features of these practices, the article examines their democratic potential and limitations. The argument is put forward that the neighborhood assembly functions as a practice of participatory cultural citizenship, whereby the art museum can enter a space of co-authorship of the local cultural environment with the local constituents and can be a participant among many.
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The neighborhood assembly in the art museum: Practicing cultural citizenship

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The article takes its point of departure in an experiment conducted at Randers Art Museum, Denmark, in which museum visitors were asked to comment on their experiences with artworks from the museum’s collection. Their comments that were subsequently shared by the museum in the exhibition space.
By examining dialogue as a form of participation, the author analyses and discusses how this particular participatory experiment created a dialogical and polyphonic museum experience in which the institutional voice was complemented and even challenged.
The article contributes to the field of research on participation by connecting theoretical and practical levels through an experimental methodological approach. It presents concrete recommendations for enhancing visitor-oriented and dialogical strategies in museum communication. Moreover, it demonstrates that the experimental approach can be very useful for both researchers and museum professionals, as long as they reflect on both the limitations and the possibilities of specific experiments like this one.
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Visitor voices in the museum space: sharing art experiences as a dialogic mode in museum communication

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The paper examines the possibilities offered by decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) for supporting audience participation in the museum sector . DAOs, a type of digital infrastructure underpinned by blockchains and smart contracts, have been seen as informing a more autonomous, self-managing, transparent, and more efficient online organization, one capable of shaping how users participate and communicate with one another. At the same time significant questions have been raised over how DAO technologies complicate the human issues of democracy and shared authority. This paper explores and evaluates the impact of DAO structures in the context of museum participation, specifically viewing them through the lens of shared authority and democracy. It argues that these technologies are capable of offering evidence-based participation, but that this is contingent on access and trust.
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Tokenistic behavior? Exploring Blockchain and DAOs as a participatory practice in museums

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This article investigates the collaborative craft-based art project Data Mirror, launched by the Trapholt Museum of Art and Design in Denmark in March 2022 with artist and weaver Astrid Skibsted. Through the lens of affect theory (Massumi, 2002, 2009), the article explores how the textile making practice and the materials in <italic>Data Mirror</italic> affected the participatory experience. Building on Christopher Kelty’s understanding of participation as strung between individuality and collectivity, the article argues that the experience of participation in <italic>Data Mirror</italic> is in fact “more than individual,” but not only in the sense defined by Kelty of being “both individual and collective at the same time” (2019, p. 18). Over and above this, the participatory experience is also about connecting with and being moved affectively by materials, tools, and – in the <italic>Data Mirror</italic> case – artistic dogmas. The aim of the article is both analytical and theoretical. Based on a close analysis of (1) material intensities and embodied experiences of stitching and (2) felt potential and creative capacity, it calls for a more embodied, material, and affective understanding of the horizontal and vertical (Eriksson, 2019; Kelty, 2016) dimensions of participation.
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Participation and affect intertwined: Linking participatory experiences and affective intensities in a collaborative craft-based art project

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Participatory art turns the artwork into a process of engagement and co-creation, and it thus involves forms of time-based coordination that influence the experience of creating participatory art. In this paper I argue that participatory art is underscored by two contrasting temporal frameworks. One is the framework of long-term durational approaches that have been internalized among artists as an ethical and political obligation toward participants; the other is the short-term temporary framework that typically comes with project funding and steers the project toward delivery of target outcomes. To show the tensions to which these contrasting temporal frameworks can give rise, I analyze the development of a participatory art project in Copenhagen’s South Harbor. Specifically, the analysis emphasizes how tensions arose in respect to delimitations of project aspects such as who constitutes the creative team, what is the task before us, and what is our expected contribution to the community. By emphasizing the tensions arising from contrasting temporal frameworks, the article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the experience of creating participatory art, and to problematizing the question of time for participatory art.
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Out of time: The experience of contrasting temporal frameworks in participatory art

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This article critically reflects on the limitations and challenges of using Cards on the Table (COTT), a participatory research method used to evaluate experiences of participation in art projects. The focus of this article is on the application of COTT as part of our evaluation of BE PART, a four-year Creative Europe Program of the European Union that ran from 2019 to 2023. The COTT method is informed by community research and participation action research, but here we highlight the ambiguous and messy nature of researching with such a broad and varied network of communities. We illustrate the tension between our desire to research in a co-productive, community-led, and action-oriented way and the realities of conducting research with a vast network of participants and limited time and budget.
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Cards on the Table: Critical reflections on a participatory research method

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 11 (2024): Issue 1 (March 2024)

Volume 10 (2023): Issue 1 (October 2023)

Volume 9 (2022): Issue 2 (October 2022)

Volume 9 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 8 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021) Health, Media and Participation

Volume 7 (2020): Issue 2 (October 2020) Failures in Cultural Participation

Volume 7 (2020): Issue 1 (July 2020) Feminism, Gender, Social Movements and Everyday Resistance

Volume 6 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019) Cultural Participation, Social Media Affect and Art

Volume 5 (2018): Issue 1 (May 2018) Community and Creative Research. Developing Participatory Methodologies

Volume 4 (2017): Issue 1 (December 2017) Playful Participation II

Volume 3 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016) Playful Participation

Volume 2 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015) Participation across Institutional and Disciplinary Boundaries

Volume 2 (2015): Issue 1 (October 2015) Mediatized Cultural Activism

Volume 1 (2014): Issue 1 (November 2014) Participatory Cultural Citizenship

Conjunctions

Conjunctions seeks to create an international and transdisciplinary forum for the investigation of user-generated cultural production, user-driven cultural participation and citizen involvement across a variety of social fields, contexts and practices, e.g. urban spaces, (digital) media, social media platforms, education and teaching, the cultural sector and creative industries, aesthetic productions and museums, health institutions, activism and design.  The overall focus of the journal is to explore the socially transformative and democratic potential of cultural participation processes, to qualify the academic understanding of what ‘participation’ is and what it involves, and to discuss the complex relations created between user-generated processes and established institutions and discourses.  We take an interest in critical analyses of participatory practices, rhetoric and involvement strategies, in affirmative investigations of participation, in explorations of explicit or conscious and implicit or non-conscious forms of participation.  Submitted articles can be focused on theoretical development or on empirical analysis (of e.g. case studies). We also welcome work that use innovative or creative methods as well as more traditional methods.  The journal invites submissions from a variety of disciplinary fields such as media and communication studies, cultural studies, interaction and participatory design, cultural geography, education, aesthetics, science and technology studies, health care, health communication, information science, sociology, anthropology, development studies and gender studies.  The journal is published twice every year.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 