ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Display to Dialogue: How Engagement Reconfigures Scientific Interpretation in Museums

• In Event: Museums of "Modern" Science

English Abstract

Science museums increasingly turn to “stakeholder engagement” to broaden participation in exhibition-making. However, the influence of stakeholder engagement as a practice in the curatorial decision-making processes remains underexplored. This paper considers how engagement practices intervene in the interpretive processes that museums use to make scientific objects meaningful, and how these interventions illuminate the negotiated nature of scientific storytelling. Using a recent exhibition on oral health at the Medical Museion, Copenhagen, as a starting point, the paper traces how early conversations with diverse stakeholder groups exposed tensions between curatorial expectations and the kinds of questions, priorities, and interpretive paths that emerged through engagement. Rather than reinforcing an existing vision, these interactions unsettled assumptions about what the exhibition was doing, and for whom, prompting reconsiderations of what objects were used and what meanings they were asked to carry. Extending beyond this case, the paper reflects on similar dynamics observed in other science-focused museum contexts, where engagement functions less as a path to consensus and more as a catalyst for rethinking curatorial judgement. Rather than assuming that such practices actually redistribute curatorial authority, the paper argues that a critical approach to stakeholder engagement draws attention to how the influence of non-curatorial actors is negotiated, constrained, or selectively incorporated. This, in turn, makes unresolved questions of authority and collaboration in exhibition-making visible. As this paper shows, such moments of negotiation and uncertainty illuminate the tensions museums encounter when working within plural scientific worlds and amid contested claims to expertise.

Author

• Nanna Kaalund, University of Copenhagen