Making the public's values work for our museum activities
Michel'Angelo Grima Hall Annex
Visitors bring with them a wealth of values, attitudes, and motivations, which interact with the content and shape the education, participation and co-creation activities museums propose. Things get even more complex when scientists and other societal actors get involved in discussions and exchanges!
In this session, we’ll explore the range of data and insights that could be available and interesting for you - from visitors’ personal backgrounds and attitudes, to the cultural values that influence how societies approach engagement in general and technology and innovation in particular. We’ll then see how you could go about capturing these insights and how you could use and apply them practically across your activities.
The session will be guided - with inspiration and reflection, at different points - by three contributors that faced this challenge in their work and who want to learn from and with you.
Outcomes: what will participants get from this session? Skills, knowledge, experience etc.
Participants will work in groups on three questions related to visitor values (e.g. what, how, and with what outcomes) proposed by the session contributors, fuelled by knowledge and inspiration from the work of the contributors and their fellow participants. They will gain a clearer sense of how they can plan public engagement activities and use information on visitors' values, personal backgrounds, and attitudes
Session speakers
Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer - Science communication and public engagement in science, technology, and complex problems.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Willemine is interested in the democratisation of science and technology. In the SocKETs project, she was involved in mapping the sociotechnical imaginaries of six countries where societal engagement was carried out. This included understanding how science and technology are valued and what role technology plays in people’s understanding of their future. It helped the project to understand the diversity of values that shapes public engagement, which informed how SocKETs activities were set up.
Leibniz Centre of Excellence for Museum Education
Siëlle’s work at the Leibniz Centre of Excellence for Museum Education involves supporting and enhancing visitor research in Germany. She will briefly discuss the insights transdisciplinary, comparable audience research can provide, ranging from various aspects of visitors’ personal backgrounds to their attitudes towards museums (in terms of trust in museums and their neutrality/positionality). She looks forward to learning from the session participants how such audience data could impact activities.
Within the TechEthos project, Greta has contributed to the development of the public engagement tools that were used to capture citizen values, attitudes and concerns towards new and emerging technologies. She also coordinated the activities of the 6 science engagement organisations that implemented them, taking stock not only of the diversity of results but also of the experiences in setting up, delivering, and reporting the value-eliciting exercises with different publics.
