3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

For over two decades, museums have been grappling with how to increase participation and engagement with community members who are historically under-engaged. By and large, the 2012 Center for the Future of Museum’s Report informs us that of the core group of museum visitors, less than 10% represent visitors of color. This course will examine the historical arch of diversity and inclusion initiatives in the field including recent activism as engineered by museum activists and change-makers of the Inclusive Museum Movement. We will explore and define discourses of participation within museum scholarship. This course will use interdisciplinary pedagogies such as Critical Race Theory and Social Inclusion Theory as informative frameworks to help us interrogate our current museum praxis, the museum space, and how invisible social structures such as institutional racism, privilege, and oppression impact our understanding of terms such as diversity, inclusion, equity, and access. In this course, we will explore why race matters in museums and seek to create and identify new discourses on diversity and inclusion for a more vibrant, 21st century museum social ecosystem.