Social Justice – Page 2 – American Alliance of Museums

Arresting Patterns

By Elizabeth Merritt

Last week we featured an essay by Sean Kelley on how the Eastern State Penitentiary has chosen to move away from neutrality and take a position on mass incarceration. Today curatorial and research assistant Brittany Webb shares how another …
Beyond Neutrality

By Elizabeth Merritt

In Season 2 Episode 2 of the Museum People podcast, New England Museums Association director Dan Yaeger argues that all museums should be social activists, describing the oft-voiced museum ambition of being “places to convene …
Futurist Friday: Building the Future By Understanding the Past

By Elizabeth Merritt

We know we don’t know what the future will be. We can deal with that–that’s what strategic foresight is for.Far more corrosive is the misconception that we do know the past.In fact, the past and the future are mirror …
Monday Musing: unbiased wages

By Elizabeth Merritt

A few weeks ago I tweeted about a post by the estimable Vu Le in which he argued that “basing pay on salary history is a harmful, borderline-unethical practice that we need to abolish.” He points out that calibrating salary …
Bringing Self-Examination to the Center of Social Justice Work in Museums

By Rose Paquet Kinsley

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2016 issue of the Museum magazine. We wrote a letter in response to the July/August 2015 issue of this magazine, which focused on themes of social justice. What follows here expands …
Laboring over Art

By Elizabeth Merritt

I have a super-quick musing for you today, sparked by something I read last Friday: Looking at How Performers Are Paid for Performance Art There has been a lot of talk lately about labor conditions and pay equity in museums (looking at …
Monday Musing: Museums and “the Flag”

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’ve been following the chorus calling for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from…well, everywhere. The Alabama and South Carolina Capitols, the physical shelves of Walmart and the virtual shelves of Amazon and eBay, even games in …
Tapping into TransAtlantic Research on Diversity & Inequality

By Elizabeth Merritt

In a couple of weeks I’ll be in London, representing the Alliance at the “Diversity, (In)equality and Differences” workshop organized by the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities. Around twenty researchers and scholars …
Museums and Social Justice: Supporting Self-Assessment

By Elizabeth Merritt

In a guest post here on the blog earlier this week, Nina Pelaez and Alyssa Greenberg reported on the self-organized convening of Museum Workers Speak at the AAM annual meeting in Atlanta a few weeks ago, where attendees addressed issues of …
Unsafe Ideas: Building Museum Worker Solidarity for Social Justice

By Elizabeth Merritt

I was very disappointed to miss the “rogue session” at the AAM meeting in Atlanta dedicated to museum labor practices. It is, as readers of this blog know, an issue of intense interest to me, and to our field. Fortunately, two of the …