Lisanne Gibson explains how her Museum Studies teaching intersects with the UEP project in a video of a mini lecture of her research.
Click here for slides
The figures tell us that museum visiting has been increasing.
According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Taking Part statistics, 51.8% of adults attended a museum once, in the first Quarter of 2014/15, compared to 42.3% in 2005/06 (the year the Taking Part survey began).
Yet, in this same, most recent quarter, only 32% of adults said they’d visited a museum 1-2 times in the year previous. Hardly a mass audience, especially when contrasted to the 72.4% of adults who say they’d visited a heritage site in the same period.
I teach future museum practitioners from around the world in the University of Leicester School of Museum Studies courses, and as part of my teaching I believe it’s important that future practitioners are aware of the social stratified nature of the museum audience and how that affects what cultural participation looks like in the UK, and internationally.
Drawing on research from Understanding Everyday Participation I ask, what might be the challenges of having museum practice, programming, management and funding which takes account of local everyday participation?
What might such a future museum look like?
You can watch a ‘bite-sized’ version of my lecture ‘Who Goes to Museums? (and who doesn’t)’ delivered as part of our 2015/16 Open Day.
You can see other UEP team members talking about their research on the everyday at the forthcoming Museum Studies at Leicester 50th Anniversary Conference