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The last twenty years has seen a gradual transformation of museums from being collections-focused to becoming audience-centred organisations. Graham Black, a `practitioner academic' with a proven commercial track record, has played an important role in enabling this change. His research has been instrumental in developing alternative approaches to display, activities and events, and online provision. Black argues that the speed of change in the external world - a `perfect storm' involving rapid demographic change, generational shift and the influence of new media —must be matched by an equally speedy response in the definition, mission and public practice of museums (`Developing Audiences for the Twenty-First-Century Museum', 2013). Through publications, talks and exemplar design practices his work has helped to shape public debates on museums and user participation/user generated content, and on museums and civil engagement, in the UK, Europe and beyond.
Impact: Public engagement: interactive demonstrations of human cognition on BBC web pages completed by 251,757 people since 2008.
Significance: The involvement of massive numbers of the public who, by successfully completing on-line tests, acquired an understanding of cognition and memory.
Beneficiaries: The public.
Attribution: As a result of his published research on human cognition at the University of Edinburgh from 2004, the BBC invited Professor Robert Logie to develop interactive demonstrations for the public.
Reach: Worldwide: 251,757 people from 150 countries. Media coverage, two Reader's Digest books (2011 and 2012) and exhibits in a major new science exhibition, launched 2013.
Dr. Elena Isayev has led three projects, drawing on the implications of historical research, in collaboration with art practitioners, to engage young people, minority and disaffected groups in shared reflection and creative activity. These projects, centred on the paradoxical idea of Future Memory, have been used to create alternative spaces in which to re-think attitudes to human mobility, otherness and identity. While promoting new forms of cultural and artistic activity, the projects have also produced social benefit, in enabling large numbers of people, especially young people in deprived communities, to think constructively about their own identity, memories and sense of belonging.
Memory Maps is an online archive of writings and images inspired by East Anglia and especially Essex. The project explores people's relationship with place. It seeks to alter public perceptions of the region and to foster ecological awareness of the natural and the made environment. Developed by Essex literature academics in collaboration with The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Memory Maps project has successfully stimulated amateurs and professionals to practise the genre of psycho-geographical writing. The team has also promoted the project to a wide general audience through public symposia, book festivals, and contributions to international media including a feature-length documentary.
The History Department at York has a long-standing commitment (embodied in the work of James Walvin, Simon Smith, Douglas Hamilton, Henrice Altink and Geoff Cubitt) to path-breaking research into the history and memory of transatlantic slavery. Our researchers have worked closely with museums and educational practitioners to establish a `virtuous circle' in which research: (i) influences the content of heritage and educational presentations; (ii) reflects on those presentations, gauging public response and prompting stakeholder debate; (iii) provides constructive feedback to museums and others. This impact case study shows how research by members of the Department has contributed to each stage of this process. Professor James Walvin's research publications from 1993 until his retirement in 2005 revealed how slavery has shaped the nature of contemporary British society, a body of work that significantly contributed to the slave trade's inclusion in the National Curriculum in 2008. In addition to his on-going record as an exhibition curator, historical advisor and commentator on slavery, he advised and helped create the York AHRC-funded `1807 Commemorated' project (2007-9), principle investigator Laurajane Smith (Archaeology) and co-investigator Geoff Cubitt; Data Management Group Walvin. This project helped heritage professionals and other stakeholders understand and analyse the extensive museum activity on slavery generated by the 2007 Bicentenary of the Act Abolishing the Slave Trade, and led to innovations in museum practice and new collaborative relationships within the sector.
This research was initiated in 2003 in recognition of the neglect by museums and galleries across the UK of disability history, arts and culture. Before the research began, disabled people — comprising the UK's largest minority — were almost entirely absent from and/or misrepresented in the UK's cultural heritage institutions. Three distinct but sequential projects investigated this and, through a programme of action research:
- stimulated and supported experimentation in museum exhibition and learning practice in the UK and internationally, enabling museums and galleries to confidently engage visitors in debates surrounding disability, disability rights, hate crime and, more broadly, discrimination and societal attitudes towards physical and mental difference;
- developed new approaches to interpretation and audience engagement that have changed the ways in which general visitors and schoolchildren think about physical and mental differences and the rights and entitlements of disabled people;
- pioneered new approaches to museum practice that have informed policy and set standards for best practice not only in the UK but internationally.
The case study demonstrates how research conducted by staff in the Centre for Museology has informed the development of innovative display and interpretation practices in public museums in the UK and overseas. It shows how applied critical and reflexive museology has been used in a range of curatorial contexts, thereby directly affecting institutional practice and, in turn, providing visitors and volunteers with new opportunities for engagement. The impact is evident in the curatorial process, involving both staff and stakeholders, and in critical responses from practitioners and policy-makers.
Marcus Waithe has carried out research that has resulted in a web-based `reconstruction' of the St George's Museum, a gallery and library for artisans founded in Sheffield in 1875 by the art and social critic, John Ruskin. Impact can be demonstrated in four areas:
Bill Niven is a public history practitioner, and an acknowledged expert on war and post-war Germany. The Buchenwald Child was a particularly well-known national story. It was based on wartime events but written up in the post 1945 period, where it was used by the socialist Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR) to demonstrate its antifascist roots and prove its sympathy towards Holocaust victims. Niven's study revealed that this much lauded story was largely founded on myth shaped by the exigencies of the Cold War (i.e. the need to prove that the GDR was the `better' Germany). His work started a major re-evaluation that stretched, as was always intended, beyond the boundaries of academia into the public domains of national identity formation within the context of reconciling the present with Germany's National Socialist and post 1945 divided pasts. This reassessment has taken the form of public discussion in the German media (newspapers, radio, TV), including a one-hour TV documentary film based largely on the book and including interviews with the Buchenwald Child himself, Niven and the director of Buchenwald Memorial Site. A paperback version of Niven's book was produced and distributed by Germany's Federal Centre for Political Education. It has since triggered discussion within organisations representing veteran survivors of the camp.
DU researchers have delivered their innovative model of participatory action research (PAR) with Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums Service (TWAM, a major regional museum service in the North east, comprising seven museums and galleries) to further social inclusion and deepen participation from socially marginalised groups. Research findings have led to: (1) enhanced income generation for TWAM, with bids citing DU research bringing in more than £0.5m at a time of shrinking resource for the museum sector; (2) the development of a major new museum gallery, which opened in July 2013; and (3) changes to professional practice consequent upon intensifying the practice of participatory working within TWAM.