The ‘co’ in co-production: Museums, community participation and Science and Technology Studies

Abstract

In this essay, I will approach museums both via their glass display cases and via the particular capacities offered by the term 'co-production'.In doing this I will draw on two genealogies of co-production.The first is focussed on the political question of how public institutions and their publics might better collaborate.It is this 'public policy' variant of the term which has most explicitly influenced the use of the term 'co-production' in museums.The second comes from Science and Technology Studies (STS).'Co-production', according to Shelia Jasanoff (2004, p 43), was first used in STS by Bruno Latour in his 1993 book We Have Never Been Modern.It has since been widely elaborated to argue that 'the realities of human experience emerge as the joint achievements of scientific, technical, and social enterprise: science and society, in a word, are co-produced, each underwriting the other's existence' (Jasanoff, 2004, p 33).Both mobilisations of the term 'co-production' -though in different ways -are concerned with opening up political potentials by indicating a variety of 'cos', a plurality of entities interacting in variable ways and with variable, and always political, effects.This is why I opened by specifically suggesting glass display cases get a bad rap.The glass case has been totemic for fifty years of critique -a shortcut for revealing museums' too-simple, modern, imperialist and deadening production of power and of facts.Yet in starting to take co-production seriously we might say that glass cases are not responsible on their own.Glass cases are part of a wider interlinking of ideas and materiality, 'material-discursive practices' (Barad, 2007, p 146;Brenna, 2014), which have enacted museums' rationalities.As a 'material-discursive practice', the use of glass cases plays a part in the production of particularly 'modern' types of matter, space, time -and therefore politics.This is a practice that generates a world which demarcates between objects and people, museums and the public and a past that is complete and a future which is yet to come.Furthermore, the glass case offers an argument for museums' institutional legitimacy -to secure objects for future publics 'on our behalf'.

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