Project facts

Duration: 2023-22-05 - 2025-21-05
Project coordinator: Scott Anthony, Science Museum Group
Project consortium: Science Museum Group (UK), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (SP), Aix-Marseille Université (FR), Norsk Teknisk Museum (NO), King’s College London (UK), Demos (UK), University of London Press (UK)
Funding bodies: JPI CH Cultural Heritage, Society and Ethics
Subject areas: Collections, Cultural Creative Industries, Education and Training, Heritage Management, History, Mediation - Education, Methods - Procedures, Policies, Research collaboration, Technologies - Scientific processes
Contact: scott.anthony@sciencemuseum.ac.uk
Budget: 601 000 EUR

Presentation

MaILHoC explores how collaborations between museums and industry have led to the creation of STM (science, technology, and medicine) heritage but also fueled controversy in the public sphere in recent years.

STM museums mainly responded to these pressures by drawing on corporate notions of accountability to govern the relationship with industry. Despite museums being more self-consciously ethical and accountable through auditing, scorecards, charters and ethical codes of conducts, their relationship with industry and the cultural products hence generated appear ever more unruly and controversial.

As Museum-patron relationships varied in forms, in place and in time, MaILHoC maps how industrial patronage of STM museums played out and shaped the display of STM heritage at different sites, including museums, expositions and science centres, in the UK, France and Spain from the immediate postwar to the late 1990s.

The project mobilizes these new understandings of STM museums and patronage to build together with STM museum practitioners social capabilities to encourage informed and participative deliberation of these relationships.

Impacts & Results

Exchange and cooperation special workshops and interventions with museum professionals in France and the United Kingdom to understand the practical and ethical challenges relating to corporate patronage and/or sponsorship of museum facilities, collections and exhibitions. Similar plans are being explored with the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the European Network of Science Centres and Museums (ECsite)

Participation in academic and professional conferences to encourage research and discussions on STM museum-industry interactions, including the running of events and workshops with the Museum Studies department at the Museum of Leicester.

Publication in the bulletin of AMCSTI, the largest association for science mediation professional in France, to describe the long history of industrial patronage of STM museums in Europe as well as to unbox the cruxes of the ethical challenges at work in French STM heritage circles today.

Conducting a series of interviews of museum practitioners from the United Kingdom, Spain and Portugal exploring their experience working with industrial partners and/or patrons, the practical implications they faced as well as the ways by which they handled the ethical concerns that arose from these interactions.

Plans to support the work of STM museum and heritage practitioners in developing ethical instruments such as the production of a method and/or template for ethical charter/convention in France.

Planned special issue aiming to re-evaluate the ruptures associated with the alleged surge of corporate practices and corporate actors in culture throughout the 1980s but also re-introduce the continuities at work in this tumultuous decade by examining how STM museums, industry and technologies of governance interacted before and throughout that crucial decade.

Planned collective volume on museum and corporate patronage in Western Europe combining contributions from academics from various museum-relevant fields and museum practitioners from across Western Europe.

Preparation of a repository where researchers and practitioners will find relevant resources on the industrial patronage of STM museums: https://sciencemuseumgroup.iro.bl.uk/collections/afa7fa4c-4412-48e8-a97b-4f16456ad076