How Do London Museums Construct Space Science and Technologies in Their Permanent Galleries?

• In Event: How Collections End: Objects, Meaning and Loss in Laboratories and Museums - II

Abstract

Many researchers highlight the problems of students not seeing STEM as ‘for me’ (Archer et al 2013) in either formal education (e.g. Francis et al 2017), or in informal educational settings (e.g. Dawson 2019). These experiences are often articulated as science being constructed as a field relevant only to a minority of students’ identities (typically white, cis-male, western). Within museum literature specifically, Macdonald (1998) has argued that science is always co-constructed in the act of curation of science galleries in museums, and, thus, I argue that scientific identity is similarly co-constructed in these galleries.

Using gallery visits to three London science museums and conversations with curators, this paper draws on mixed methods research to understand the construction of space science and cultural identities within the galleries. Through paying attention to gallery spaces; visual presentation; object, image and artefact selection; and textual cues; this paper develops ideas about the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015) that are constructed and perpetuated in these galleries.

This paper contributes to STS by developing articulated knowledge about what is present in museum galleries, which invariably take on ‘authority effects of the temporal stability’ (Macdonald 1998, p.4). This paper is part of a broader piece of queer feminist research that develops ideas, informed by Ahmed’s ideas on ‘queer use’, about how sociotechnical imaginaries are localised and developed within in science and technology museums, and realised through the types of science they communicate, the selection of objects, artefacts and images, and the aesthetic representation that they take on in these spaces.

Author

• Eleanor Armstrong, University College London