Digital Heritage and Contingent Labour in the Museum

Abstract

Museums have responded to calls for accountability and reconciliation by establishing cultural recuperation programming, which commonly involves community members travelling to museums to visit and research object collections. Community groups identify the ability to be physically present with their belongings and bear witness to the stories and relations they embody as one of the most valuable outcomes of these initiatives. These visits are often prohibitively expensive and time consuming; therefore, museums are increasingly exploring digital solutions to expand access to collections and other resources. However, North American museums in particular are increasingly reliant on contingent labour to fill roles previously occupied by salaried staff. This is especially true for digital initiatives that frequently operate on a limited-term, grant-funded basis. Existing literature in museum studies offers little critical analysis of the nature of digital museum labour and its impact on workers, outcomes and community partners, focusing instead on standards, protocols and best practices. I argue that this shift towards contingent digital labour in museums challenges the robust, locally specific ‘logic of care’ that scholars suggest undergirds satisfactory cultural recuperation work. The impacts of this shift are compounded by the institutional tendency towards organisational silos and the reliance on technical specialists and specialised knowledges to ensure the success of digital projects. In this paper I attend to the experiences, perspectives and everyday practices of those people ‘doing’ digital work in the museum as a method to uncover the nature of that labour behind the scenes. Furthermore, I demonstrate that reliance on contingent labour perpetuates harm against community groups that have already been and continue to be harmed by institutions. To do so, I bring together extant data on employment precarity in digital museum work with literature on decolonial museology and the use of digital technologies for cultural recuperation to analyse the way that the precarious, technically specialised and temporally limited nature of digital museum labour articulates established museological praxis.