Museums & Social Issues

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Care, repair, and the future social relevance of

museums

Nuala Morse

To cite this article: Nuala Morse (2022): Care, repair, and the future social relevance of museums,
Museums & Social Issues, DOI: 10.1080/15596893.2022.2104815

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MUSEUMS & SOCIAL ISSUES
https://doi.org/10.1080/15596893.2022.2104815

Care, repair, and the future social relevance of museums

Nuala Morse
School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This intervention reflects on examples of UK museum and gallery COVID-19; care; repair;
outreach and engagement activity that took place during the museum community
COVID-19 lockdown. This included creative packs sent to people engagement; socially
engaged museums; health
who were shielding, online sessions for mental health service
inequalities
users, and phone services for isolated older adults, part of a range
of efforts to continue connections while buildings were closed.
Though seemingly limited in scale or impact, I argue that it is in
these small acts of care that we might find the renewed relevance
of the museum. Drawing on theoretical work on repair (notably
Steven J. Jackson), the essay outlines a future social role of
museums founded on “care thinking” and oriented towards the
communal work of repair.

Introduction
The global COVID-19 pandemic brought care into the collective in a more defined manner.
The world awoke to our essential need for care as everything else came to a halt. Care also
became more public, in the emergency caregiving provided by those on the frontline, the
care required for those ill and dying, and demands for greater care from the state as care
systems across the world buckled. In the UK, where this essay is set, COVID-19 exposed
many of the existing fractures in society and its care infrastructures. Most painfully, it
further exacerbated already deep-rooted social and health inequalities, with life-and-
death consequences (Marmot et al., 2020). For many, the strict lockdown that was
imposed following the spread of COVID-19 was experienced as a long period of isolation,
cut off from friends and family, with direct negative impacts on mental health, especially
for those with pre-existing conditions and with low socioeconomic positions (Fancourt
et al., 2021). Our collective need for care (and for connection) was brought into stark
relief. But as the weeks of lockdown dragged on,1 the pandemic was also marked by a
renewal of care – an awakening of communal solidarity through the spontaneous bur-
geoning of mutual aid groups and support networks (see Sitrin & Colectiva Sembrar, 2020).
Museums and galleries in the UK were often quick to respond. As venues closed,
content and exhibitions were put online, and later, live-streamed tours and a range of
innovative digital delivery was developed, ensuring access to culture through lockdown.

CONTACT Nuala Morse nuala.morse@leicester.ac.uk

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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2 N. MORSE

Arts engagement at home played an important role in helping people cope during lock-
down (Mak et al., 2021).2
In this short intervention, I wish to draw attention to the responses of the museum and
gallery sector’s community engagement teams. These teams work with individuals who do
not typically visit museums; people who are often classed as vulnerable or otherwise
socially marginalized. Community engagement is founded on principles of access and
inclusion, and is driven by local partnerships with community groups and third sector
organizations. In the UK, this area of work has developed over the last 8 years to
include programming focused on “health and wellbeing,” in partnership with the health
and social care sector, to include people with mental health issues, people living with
dementia, or those living with chronic ill-health (Chatterjee & Noble, 2013). Typically,
museum engagement sessions take place in small groups, inside galleries, or in commu-
nity spaces. Sessions involve museum object handling and creative activity (e.g. photogra-
phy, creative writing, crafts), providing opportunities to reflect, to make, to feel inspiration
and joy. This is work with material, relational and affective qualities that uses culture to
connect people with others, and perhaps, at its best, to reconnect with themselves
(Morse, 2021).
Elsewhere I have argued that the practice of community engagement is best under-
stood as care work, though it is rarely described in these specific terms (though general
calls for the museum to “care for people” are not new, and have also gained renewed
emphasis in the last few years, which I reflect on later in this piece).3 Seen as care work,
community engagement is about providing emotional and practical support for people
to engage meaningfully with culture, and on their own terms. In many ways, the
meaning and value of this work is defined at this intimate scale, between participants,
museum workers and museum spaces/objects. When museums and galleries closed,
engagement teams had to quickly reconsider how to continue working with participants
at a distance, many of whom were vulnerable, shielding, and isolated.
This essay provides an impression of the activities undertaken during lockdown. It does
not aim for comprehensive analysis,4 but rather to notice and call attention to the sector’s
determined efforts to continue providing support, comfort, and connections in the
absence of an open building. From the early months of lockdown, group sessions
moved online, creative resources were sent to homes, and new telephone services were
started for those with limited or no access to the internet. I argue that it is in these
small acts of care that we might find the renewed relevance of the museum. From here,
the essay comes to an intervention, drawing together care theory and notions of repair,
to put forward a future social role for museums founded on practices and ethics of
care, oriented (and scaled) towards the work of communal repair. The argument is posi-
tioned in the UK in response to the pandemic but the ideas can be applied further in
response to the wider contexts in which museums are implicated.

Acts of care in a crisis (uploading, packaging, and posting care)

As museums closed their doors, many professionals had to quickly adapt to continue sup-
porting regular groups. A report by the Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance (2020) docu-
ments responses from small museums and major galleries, though it is difficult to assess
the scale or reach overall.5 The tenor of this work, however, demands pause and reflection.
 MUSEUMS & SOCIAL ISSUES 3

For engagement projects supporting vulnerable adults, sessions that regularly took place
in the museum had to adapt to provide continuity of care through a distanced community.
For example, Pathways to Wellbeing, a long-standing program at the Holburne Museum,
Bath, supports people with lived experience of mental ill-health through a referral
pathway to arts activities in the gallery. The artist-led sessions moved to weekly arts activi-
ties available to download with demonstration videos on their website.6 A mental health
referral project at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery moved to WhatsApp, with artists
sending weekly activities and participants responding with photos of their artworks.
Across the sector, email chains were started, outreach sessions were delivered on Zoom,
and Facebook groups were created to keep group members connected with each other
and with the museum.
Museums with programs for older adults such as Imperial War Museums and the North-
ern Ireland War Memorial in Belfast worked closely with support agencies and care homes
to continue providing cultural engagement inspired by the collections through online
activities supported by deliveries of creative resources and handling boxes.7 This group
was at particular risk of isolation, with all care home visits suspended during lockdown
and for much longer after restrictions lifted. Seven Stories (Newcastle)8 and several Man-
chester-based museums9 developed online play provision for their parents and babies
groups, another group particularly isolated during the pandemic and at higher risk of
post-natal depression.10 The Fitzwilliam Museum made deliveries of creative activities to
families with young children with life-limiting illness as part of their partnership
program with a Cambridge hospice.11 Some museums picked up the phone. The
Beaney House of Art & Knowledge continued their older adults program by developing
a “telecare” program for 100 people who were shielding, including people with dementia
and people with visual impairments.12
For some museums, the response was not to continue delivering a program of activities
as such, but rather to find ways to stay in touch with participants through emails, news-
letters and calls. This was the case for youth engagement projects at Leeds Museums
and Galleries and at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to support participants in
their Creative Carers network, a group further negatively impacted by COVID-19 as they
were shielding to protect others.
Postal deliveries of creative resources were a key response from the culture and arts
sector, in recognition that many participants did not have affordable digital access in
their homes. Some sections of the museum and gallery sector developed deliveries
through partnership with local health visitors, council services, and foodbanks to reach
families with the greatest need. Creative resources were added to the delivery of essential
food supplies, and later museums established their own delivery services in efforts to
relieve pressure from council services and support organizations. Colchester and
Ipswich Museums delivered creative packs to 2000 families identified by the council as
experiencing digital poverty or food poverty.13 The National Justice Museum (Nottingham)
reached out by writing letters to people in prisons,14 while Tyne and Wear Archives and
Museums sent postcards to care home residents. The Greater Manchester Combined Auth-
ority, with involvement from local museums, delivered a total of 38,000 creative packs to
vulnerable young people and older people.
These paragraphs only parse the range of responses from the sector, but they give a
clear sense of the acts of care that took place at the height of lockdown: resourceful
4 N. MORSE

and determined efforts to maintain contact and connections with regular groups, and to
play a part in networks of critical support.

Theories of care (this is what care looks like)

The political theorist Jean Tronto (1993, 2013) describes four phases that together shape
“good care”:

(1) Attentiveness – caring about: noticing the unmet caring needs of another.
(2) Responsibility – caring for: taking on the responsibility and burden of meeting those
needs.
(3) Competence – care giving: the work of care.
(4) Responsiveness – care receiving: checking that caring needs have been met.

These elements of care are visible in the practical and affective labor of museum engage-
ment workers that facilitate and maintain spaces of care in and out of the museum (Morse,
2021; Morse & Munro, 2015). Understanding care practices in the museum requires atten-
tion to everyday practice; the most mundane, ordinary interactions and emotions – in
habitual times this would include cups of tea, small talk, and ensuring people feel wel-
comed in museum settings. The pandemic upended these forms of interactions, produ-
cing new forms of caring relationships: caring through the screen, on the line, with a
parcel or a letter. In each case, these acts of care reflect Tronto’s four elements of care: noti-
cing unmet caring needs – the isolation and anxiety produced by lockdown; taking
responsibility to act, and doing so through appropriate (competent) means – using
resources, time and technologies at hand to remain connected with groups; and respon-
siveness – continuously checking in with regular groups. A key quality of care is adapting
to changing circumstances, since care is a matter of “attentive experimentation” (Mol et al.,
2010, p. 2). The responses to the pandemic reflect museum workers’ attempts to provide
“good care” in the unique context of a national lockdown. Some further initial reflections
are provided here.

A clear(er) duty of care

Once caring needs are noticed, caring relations are marked out by the responsibility to act.
In museum community engagement teams, care work often takes form as a moral respon-
sibility linked to a professional sense of public service and duty of care to communities
(Morse, 2021). Wider research has shown how those most vulnerable in our communities
were also those most adversely impacted by the pandemic (it was never the “great equali-
ser” that some suggested) (Whitehead et al., 2021). The social (care) issues being addressed
through museum programming before the pandemic became exacerbated during lock-
down, with loneliness and social isolation felt more sharply, anxiety and depression heigh-
tened by the pressures of lockdown. In these circumstances, the duty of care is felt more
intensely; the responsibility to act reflected in the range of activity delivered by museums.
These dedicated acts of care stand as evidence of teams’ deep and genuine commit-
ment to responding to needs even in challenging circumstances. They present a statement
of intent and purpose: the museum would be there even when things got tough. Buildings
 MUSEUMS & SOCIAL ISSUES 5

shut down but people were not forgotten, partners were not abandoned. Through small
acts of care, the museum world would continue to provide joyful distraction and creative
engagement in the darker moments of the lockdown.
Care theorists underscore our interdependencies; care is a mutual accomplishment, in
which care-giver and care-receiver are bound in a mutual sense of identity. In community
engagement work, I have noted how professional subjectivities, values, and ambitions are
bound in a deep sense of commitment to others. Providing care in the unique circum-
stances of lockdown brings these dependencies into new arrangements. For some
museums the focus was on continuing contact with regular groups; others developed
new partnerships to reach out to those with the greatest need. From these experiences,
museum professionals will very likely be reflecting on the core purpose of their work;
what impact they want to achieve; and, in turn, what they expect their organizations to
be and stand for. The question then becomes what to make of these answers, and what
to do next.

Care work becomes visible

The pandemic brings to light some of the challenges that come with care. Feminist theor-
ists have discussed the many ways that care work is dismissed, reflecting a society where
the habit of caring for others is largely devalued (e.g. Tronto, 2013). In the museum, we see
this too: community engagement is kept separate from core museum functions (see
Sandell & Nightingale, 2012). The skills, knowledge, and talent of this work are not
always recognized, and this work goes mostly unseen (Morse, 2021). Some of the lock-
down activity has been documented and celebrated in special COVID-19 awards,15 and
in some ways, this work may have become more visible as it continued during lockdown
while buildings closed. However, as the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance report
notes, “the skills, time and energy for this work were undervalued” (2020, p. 2). It is
likely that much activity was simply “got on with,” as practical efforts led by small teams
to try and keep in touch with people, and to support civil society partners overwhelmed
with demand. Determined, tenuous acts of care. Greater understanding, visibility, and
support for the care work of the museum may be critical to where we go next.

Too much care?

Care is embodied and emotional work. Yet the risks to staff of working with the most vul-
nerable groups are rarely fully assessed or considered. There is not always training, and
very little supervision or “debriefing protocols” to address the emotional impact of this
labor of care. Funding structures rarely include provision for caring responsibilities (see
Belfiore, 2021). The impact of lockdown on staff has not yet been fully explored, acknowl-
edged, or addressed and there are likely psychological costs to the work that took place
over this period.16 It is very likely that professionals will have been exposed to high
levels of depression, distress, and even death within the groups they worked with.
Taking on the burden of meeting the needs of others during unprecedented and uncertain
times, whilst experiencing the same restrictions, being exposed to the same possibilities of
infection, facing similar isolation, or having to support families at home,17 is likely to have
had complex impact on staff wellbeing. In recognition of this impact, a UK based network
6 N. MORSE

of care (GLAMCares) has emerged, driven by mid-career professionals with experience of

delivering this work directly and supporting teams that do. It currently exists without
funding and operates as a Twitter handle, an online community and support events,
open to anyone working in galleries, museums, libraries and archives, offering a safe
space for discussing distressing work experiences as well as providing joyful moments
of community and self-care. Institutional and sector-wide responses are now needed to
reflect on the hidden costs of caring through the pandemic.

Care, repair, and the future social role of museums and galleries (from
broken world thinking to care thinking)
There are two components to my intervention here. The first is to notice and recognize the
care work of community engagement teams during lockdown, and reflect possible
impacts of this experience. This short essay recounted just a few examples of how
museum community engagement teams responded through acts of care aimed at main-
taining broken links between people and sources of support and creativity during a time of
crisis. I want to suggest that in the acts of care that took place during lockdown, we might
find the renewed relevance of the museum. Here we might locate ways forward, having
moved out of lockdown: a moment to reflect on the importance of care, connections,
and creativity to our lives, and within this, an opportunity to gain greater clarity on the
duty of care of museums.
The case studies reported in the Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance report highlight
how these initiatives provided essential support for many during a time of crisis. The report
and the examples discussed here also underscore the importance of partnership working
across different sectors – museums, charities, local government, health and social care. This
work was meaningful because the museum reached out to support its communities. Prior
to the pandemic, I began to outline a future role of the museum as a space of social care,
as “as a link in a chain of caring institutions … directly supporting the activities of health
and social care organizations and their service users through museum activities” (Morse,
2021, p. 135). The museum as a space of social care is underpinned by an ethics of care
that directs practical actions responding to the greatest community needs, often identified
in terms of vulnerability and inequality, including health and social inequality. Collaboration
with community members, service users and other caring professionals is central to this
role to ensure that care is competent; museum workers are not social workers or therapists,
but they are involved in society’s work of care. In the wake of the pandemic, this role is
further defined. The importance of public health has been foregrounded as health inequalities
have worsened, including inequalities in life expectancy (Marmot et al., 2020), and we do not
yet understand the long-term injury of the pandemic in terms of mental health and the phys-
ical impacts of long-COVID. This opens up a role for museums as partners in the repair of local
care infrastructures – both formal and informal structures of individual and community
support. In the UK, the National Centre for Creative Health was established in 2021 with the
aim of promoting the integration of cultural assets in healthcare systems, including
museums and galleries, and a strategic focus on tackling health inequalities. There are here
practical opportunities for museums to develop a wider caring role.
There are, however, pre-requisites. For this work to be meaningful the first step must be
to embed cultures of care across the museum. This work needs to become more visible
 MUSEUMS & SOCIAL ISSUES 7

with practical arrangements in place. In the most immediate, this means recognizing the
hidden toll of taking on the burdens of caring responsibilities, and the specific impact of
the pandemic on these teams. Longer term, there is a need to nurture those caring pro-
fessionals in the museum into leadership positions.
In many ways the notion of the museum as a space of social care holds specific
orientations. But in centering care, other roles and commitments in museum work
are surfaced. This brings me to the second part of my intervention, to introduce the
notion of broken world thinking and the work of repair. In his essay “Rethinking
Repair,” Steven J. Jackson proposes “broken world thinking” to help us better under-
stand “the real limits and fragility of the worlds we inhabit” (Jackson, 2014, p. 221).18
The pandemic revealed what is broken in our society – the care infrastructures
unable to cope, the precarious lives and livelihoods of those most vulnerable in our
communities further exposed. For Jackson, breaking is “generative and productive”
(2014, p. 223) and can help us locate neglect, negligence, and irresponsibility. Broken
world thinking is a “provocation … towards new and different kinds of politics” (2014,
p. 223), an explicit critique of a world where the habit of caring is undervalued, side-
lined, or refused. I want to suggest broken world thinking can directly benefit
museums studies research, policy, and practice in helping to identify the wider social
contexts they might respond to. But to direct action and meaning towards the work
of repair, we also need “care thinking”19 in the museum, as a practical and ethical
response to broken world thinking.
For Jackson, broken world thinking locates the work of repair. In his view repair is not
necessarily about fixing (fully) or a return to where we were – repair is about necessary
alternatives (which we hope will be better). Jackson describes repair as
the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are
maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated
work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accom-
plished. (2014, p. 222)

Repair and care work are closely related. An oft-cited definition of care is:
a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’
so that we can live in it as well as possible. (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 4)

In the cases discussed here, museum activities were practical responses to breakdown as
buildings closed and groups were no longer able to meet. If we start to recognize
museum work as practices of care, as I have suggested in previous work and here with
the engagement teams’ responses to the pandemic, we can begin to consider the work
of museums in repairing broader social worlds. The responses to the pandemic are acts
of care as well as efforts to maintain, continue, and repair broken links between people
and sources of support and creativity during lockdown. Small acts such as picking up the
phone or sending a parcel on the surface may appear mundane, but I argue it is in these
discrete acts that we can locate a more profound potential. Following Jackson, acts of
repair are often humble, mundane, and overlooked, yet nonetheless consequential. As
Graham and Thrift (2007, p. 6) further note, “what starts out as repair may soon become
improvement, innovation, even growth.” To establish such potential, we must reconnect
acts of care with a moral dimension: namely, an ethics of care. Turning to feminist
8 N. MORSE

scholarship we find care ethics care as moral relations that shape ethical responsibility in
chains of mutual responsiveness and interdependence (Barnes, 2006; Held, 2006; Tronto,
2013). Care ethics are both normative and contextual: local solutions to specific situations
need to be developed to work towards “good care.” The ethics of care places the
museum within entanglements of dependence in order to identify its burdens of responsi-
bility vis-à-vis its publics and communities in a specific sense, but also in relation to an
expansionary world that we individually and collectively inhabit. Care ethics foreground
the public character of care, to guide our thinking by which the museum might be best
used to care for, maintain, and repair our neighborhoods, our environments, and our worlds.
We are surrounded by broken things – and many of the things we care about as
museum studies scholars and practitioners are implicated and in need of repair – from
social injustices to crisis in nature. It is significant that the language of care (and with
this, notions of carelessness and self-care) has emerged with more clarity in the last
years (see Chatzidakis et al., 2020) and across international museum contexts. Care
ethics are both implicit and explicit in decolonizing discourse in US museums and in
response to Black Lives Matter, notable in the voices of La Tanya Autry, Yesumi Umolu,
and Monica O. Montgomery, in Twitter collectives such as MASS Action and the Empathetic
Museum, which also request greater care for the workforce. In their recent book Transform-
ing Inclusion in Museums (Moore et al., 2022), drawing together reflections from a decade
of the Inclumuseum website, the authors articulate the need to center caring practices as
the route to achieving inclusion across the institution. In different ways, care thinking is
providing resources to respond to broken things in and around the museum.
COVID-19 hit our precarious lives in ways we are still coming to terms with. After a crisis
we are faced with the question of how we get back to “normal.” If a return to “normal” is
unimaginable, then the answer is to take what is broken into new possibilities. Care think-
ing in the museum offers some important directions to those significant questions of
societal repair. It requires a clear(er) articulation of museums’ contribution to society as
we reflect on the long damage of COVID-19, where the sector was before the disruption,
and the work that is needed today.

Notes
1. The first UK lockdown began on 23rd March 2020 and lasted until July 4th. During this
period all hospitality venues were required to close, including cultural venues. A second
lockdown took place over a month in November 2020, followed by the implementation of
a tier system that immediately put many regions into the highest tier with further restric-
tions and continued closures. The third lockdown came into place on 6th January 2021
with museums required to remain closed until 17th May, with final restrictions being
lifted on 19th July, following widespread vaccination of the adult population. Overall,
much of the UK was under some form of lockdown from March 2020 to July 2021,
with broad requirements to “stay at home.” Museums were closed, or at other times oper-
ated under significant restrictions throughout 2020 and into 2021.
2. It should be noted however that the research identifies that people who engaged in the arts
during COVID-19 were the same as those who typically engage.
3. I describe community engagement work of museums as care in The Museum as a Space
of Social Care (2021). This idea draws on and takes forward Lois H. Silverman’s scholar-
ship on the “social work” of the museum and their role in creating cultures of caring
(2009).
 MUSEUMS & SOCIAL ISSUES 9

4. Further, formal research is being carried out by the author to gain a deeper understanding of
the impact of this period on museum staff.
5. See also case studies collated by the Centre for Cultural Value (Gray & Wright, 2021).
6. https://www.holburne.org/learning/community-engagement/pathways-to-wellbeing/
activities/.
7. For further information on this project, see: https://www.iwm.org.uk/partnerships/subject-
specialist-network/connecting-sharing-learning-project.
8. For further information on this project, see: https://www.sevenstories.org.uk/blog/seven-
stories-wins-best-lockdown-project-at-the-national-museums-change-lives-awards.
9. For further information on this project, see: https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/
sites/default/files/2020-07/Case%20study%20-%20Muso%20Baby.pdf.
10. A type of isolation I understood acutely, with a baby girl born June 2020.
11. For further information on this project, see: https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/
sites/default/files/2020-07/Case%20study%20-%20University%20of%20Cambridge%
20Museums%20-%20EACH.pdf.
12. For further information on this project, see: https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/
sites/default/files/2020-07/Case%20study%20-%20the%20Beaney.pdf.
13. For further information on this project, see: https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/
sites/default/files/2020-07/Case%20study%20-%20CIMS.pdf.
14. For further information on this project, see: https://www.museumsassociation.org/campaigns/
museums-change-lives/awards-2021/.
15. For example, the Museum Association’s Museums Change Lives award in 2020 included a
COVID-19 project category, awarded to Seven Stories for its work supporting families with
new-borns.
16. It is important to also note that many staff working in council-led museums were deployed to
support other statutory services, including food and PPE distribution, as well as frontline
support hotlines. The impact on these staff as they were exposed to the sharper end of the
COVID-19 crisis has not been recognised or acknowledged, the probable injury not yet pro-
cessed or discussed.
17. Is it well known that the museum profession is largely female, and many workers in these roles
are likely to have taken on further caring responsibilities for their families during lockdown
(see https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/women-working-caring-uk-lockdown/).
18. Jackson is writing in the context of human-technology relationships, but his thinking on repair
has great purchase in other fields, as I suggest here.
19. I describe care thinking more fully in The Museum as a Space of Social Care. Care thinking
brings together theoretical work on care with on-the-ground observations of caring relations
in museum work.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the museum professionals who shared their lockdown projects, and to col-
leagues, the editors, and the reviewer who provided comments on early drafts.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Nuala Morse is a Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Her main research
focus is on museum work as ethics and practices of care. Her research draws together social geogra-
phy, museum studies, medical humanities and organizational studies to examine the “social work” of
10 N. MORSE

culture professionals, and the role of museums as spaces of social care. A related aspect of this work
explores the links between cultural participation, health, well-being and recovery. Another strand of
research is focused on equitable museum careers, workforce development and organizational
change in the museum sector.

ORCID
Nuala Morse http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6709-094X

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