Inclusion in museums: a matter of social justice

Abstract

ABSTRACTCalls for greater inclusion in US museums have recently become hard to ignore. The intersection of inclusion and museums, however, has longer roots and has primarily been understood as a means for museums to ensure and increase public access to their activities and services. Despite the field’s long-standing attention to inclusion, visitor and employee demographic studies do not indicate that US museums’ publicness significantly extends beyond a privileged subset of the population. In this paper, I argue that inclusion in museums is a matter of social justice. Using Nancy Fraser’s two-dimensional theory of social justice, I argue that inclusion efforts in museums have thus far been unsuccessful because there has been (1) insufficient attention to demands of recognition and (2) insufficient coordination of redistribution and recognition endeavours. Developing a proper appreciation of the justice-structured aspect of inclusion is more likely to produce the results to which many museum professionals aspire.