Beyond Evaluation: Understanding Museums and Cultural Citizenship

Hosted by the University of Leeds Centre for Critical Studies in Museums, Galleries and Heritage: 

Beyond Evaluation:
Understanding Museums and Cultural Citizenship
Lise Sattrup and Anne Mette W. Nielsen

Tuesday 14th January, 4.30-6pm
Old Mining Building, G.19 (ground floor)

A persistent question for museums is how to understand what we do? There has been a very strong focus in recent years on ‘evaluation’ and ‘best practice’ as a key method for knowing about practice. Yet both 'evaluation' and 'best practice' seem always in danger of drawing too strong boundaries between the museum and the world and seem to settle too quickly the challenging questions of 'What is useful knowledge?' 'What is the relationship between knowing and learning?' 'What is a democratic museum practice?' 

Drawing their ongoing research exploring questions of museums, learning and cultural citizenship, Lise Sattrup and Anne Mette W. Nielsen will present and discuss their research strategies. Focusing on:

- Strategies for collecting data in collaboration with museums (participant observation)
- Selection of data and deciding what is important (focus on disorder/ disturbance)
- Strategies for analysis (potentiality instead of evaluation or best practice).

Lise Sattrup is a PhD fellow at The Department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University and the SMK (The National Gallery of Denmark). Lises PhD is associated with a larger Citizenship Project taking place in 10 museums and Cultural Institutions in Denmark. In collaboration with museum staff she is examining how exhibitions and education at Art Museums can contribute to cultural citizenship. Lise have been working as Head of Education at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art.

Anne Mette W. Nielsen, PhD., is temporarily appointed post doc at The Danish Centre for Youth Research (CEFU) and external lecturer at the Departments of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Anne Mette’s PhD was associated with a Globalization Project taking place in 12 secondary schools in Denmark. In collaboration with educators, students and a number of external partners (between them art museums) she has examined how new borderings appear in the field of education, when relations and settings for education are changing. Her work focuses on how to (re)think these educational transformations in relation to strategies of democracy.

All welcome but register with Helen Graham on h.graham@leeds.ac.uk

Directions: Building 53 on Campus Map (off Woodhouse Lane): http://www.leeds.ac.uk/campusmap 

This event is part of the ‘Ways of Knowing: Exploring the different registers, values and subjectivities of collaborative research’  project co-ordinated from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme.