Curating Knowledge and Curating Fun: An Analysis of the Expanding Roles of Children’s Museums

Abstract

Museums constantly undergo shifts and changes in the roles and functions they serve in society. We report on the expanding roles of a children’s STEAM museum through a case study of two adult-only, fundraising events that the museum implemented. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative measures, our analysis pursues two complementary threads. First, we seek to characterize those events in detail so that we might understand the events’ culture and functioning. Second, we look into the population who frequents the events, focusing specifically on various indicators of socio-economic status. By bringing these analytical threads together, we corroborate the finding that museums are expanding into curating fun experiences that are highly tailored to certain segments of the adult public. Importantly, attending to the empirical details of such processes, we further find that the observed changes 1) directly impact the job demands and require skills of children’s museum staff, 2) reify the museum as an important economic agent in the community, and 3) potentially reproduce patterns of inequitable access to STEAM cultural capital, among others.

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