More Project Updates
Livi’s second post as Museum X Resident E-Curator continues a conversation we want to keep open: not just who gets invited into museums, but what happens once people arrive, and whether participation ultimately leads to agency, authority and meaningful change.
These posts are not intended to offer fixed answers. They are part of Museum X’s ongoing invitation to question practice, share learning and create dialogue across the sector and with the communities we work alongside. We’d love to hear what resonates, what you would challenge, and what these questions look like in your own practice.
Sandra Shakespeare
Founder & Executive Director, Museum X
Introduction: A pathway to where?
In Ancestors Are Not Collections, we ended with one question:
Who has power over what happens next?
That question does not stop at the museum collections database. It follows us into recruitment panels, internships, curatorial teams, funding decisions, boardrooms and senior leadership. If museums are serious about redistributing power, we also have to ask who gets invited into the institution, and what happens to them once they arrive.
Museums have become increasingly comfortable talking about equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), representation and participation. But inviting people into institutions is not the same as creating institutions in which they can belong, remain, progress, thrive, and ultimately exercise authority.
We often talk about creating career pathways into the museum sector…
But a pathway to where?
We need to stop treating pathways as proof of progress and start testing what happens at each stage:
Invitation → Inclusion → Care → Retention → Progression → Authority
And running through every stage are two questions:
Who has power here?
What does care require here?
Because power without care can become extractive or coercive. But care without agency risks reinforcing the very power imbalance it is meant to address.
1. The Invitation: Who gets through the door, and why?
Museums have spent years developing internships, placements, fellowships, outreach programmes and recruitment initiatives intended to increase diversity.
Yet only 7% of the workforce in ACE National Portfolio museums was Black, Asian or ethnically diverse in 2022/23, compared with 15% across the wider National Portfolio workforce and 18% of the working-age population.
Museum X and Culture& explored this in It’s About Handing Over Power. We found that very few diversity initiatives specifically targeted curatorial roles. Most concentrated on generic entry-level opportunities, with minimal evidence of long-term impact. The research also found frustration around a continuing glass ceiling, structural exclusion and the lack of routes into seniority.
So, the question is not simply who is invited in, it is also about the intention behind it, why are they invited?:
Is it to improve our demographic statistics?
Or to demonstrate representation?
Or to bring different perspectives into an institution that otherwise remains unchanged?
Or are we inviting people in because we are prepared for them to influence what happens next?
Being visible without having influence is tokenism. This is when someone is included primarily to create the appearance of diversity, without being given meaningful influence or the support needed to thrive. This doesn’t create the progress needed for transformation because there is no handing over of power or authority.
Ask: Who designs the invitation? Who gets invited? And what are they actually being invited to change?
2. The Inclusion: Does being invited mean being welcomed to influence change?
We see the same problem when we talk about museum audiences. National Lottery Heritage Fund research reported that:
76% of people from ethnic minority backgrounds were interested in exploring or celebrating traditions, languages and art forms, compared with 62% of White respondents.
60% of people from an ethnic minority background were interested in engaging with museum or heritage content on social media or through online communities, compared with 37% of White respondents
People from ethnic minority backgrounds are twice as likely to say that feeling out of place was a barrier to participating in heritage: 12% compared with 6% of White respondents.
We have described marginalised communities as “hard to reach” for years. But If the communities are interested in heritage but feel out of place in heritage institutions, perhaps the communities aren’t hard to reach, perhaps the institution is hard to enter?
And that question matters both for visitors and for the workforce.
A museum can recruit a Black member of staff and still expect them to assimilate into an unchanged institutional culture. You can be invited into a space without feeling welcome or that you belong there. Especially when you can be ‘included’ without being able to influence the conditions around you.
This is one of the problems with tokenism and performative EDI. Simply adding people of colour to existing systems can leave the underlying unequal distribution of power untouched. Catalyst describes how EDI work can become a tick-box exercise that places responsibility for change on the very people experiencing inequality, rather than changing the system around them.
Ask: Who defines what inclusion looks like? Who has to adapt to whom? Who can influence the culture once they arrive?
3. The Care: What do people need to thrive once they are here?
Being invited in and feeling welcome are important, but neither guarantees that people will be supported once they are there.
Care asks us to look at the conditions around participation. Are people listened to? Can they safely challenge institutional practice? Is racism addressed when it occurs? Or are marginalised staff expected to educate colleagues, sit on every EDI group and provide lived-experience expertise alongside the work they were actually employed to do?
This work has a cost.
Cultural practitioners, artists, curators and community collaborators often carry relationships long after workshops end. They remember what somebody disclosed. They hold difficult conversations, maintain trust, check in and repair relationships. Yet this emotional and relational labour is rarely recognised as an outcome of the work, let alone compensated for within project budgets.
JC Niala’s research on care in museums is useful here because it shows the gap that can exist between the care institutions say they provide and the care communities actually experience. Relationships of trust can be built between museum staff and communities while the authority to make decisions still sits elsewhere.
Care therefore cannot simply mean being kind or creating a welcoming environment. It also has to ask whether people have agency within the relationship.
Ask: Who is doing the caring? Who carries the emotional cost? What does care require from the institution, not just from the people it invites in?
4. Retention: Can people stay without carrying the institution with them?
Having diversity present doesn't mean it will last. We have to ask what happens after recruitment.
• Are people supported?
• Are they listened to?
• Are they expected to carry unpaid responsibility for organisational diversity?
• Is racism dealt with when it occurs?
• Can people safely challenge institutional practice?
Anti-EDI discussion- Black Equity Organisation argues that the UK is already experiencing the effects of the US anti-DEI backlash, with organisations weakening, renaming or retreating from racial-equity commitments when they become politically uncomfortable. Its response is that institutions need more sustained anti-racist leadership, not retreat.
We have worked with institutions that recognise they need external expertise around anti-racism, EDI and organisational change. But too often that knowledge is contracted in rather than built into the organisation itself.
What happens when the consultant leaves?
What happens when the one member of staff holding those relationships together moves on?
And what happens when EDI commitments become politically uncomfortable?
The current backlash against EDI makes these questions even more important. Organisations cannot claim to be committed to equity only while that commitment is convenient. As the Black Equity Organisation has argued, retreating from racial-equity work does not remove inequality; it leaves the structures that created it untouched.
Retention therefore must be about more than keeping someone in post. It means creating an environment where people do not have to continually absorb the emotional, cultural and organisational cost of making the institution more inclusive for everyone else.
It also means retaining the knowledge and relationships created through that work.
Because if the work disappears when one person leaves, it was never embedded in the institution.
Ask: Who carries the responsibility for making inclusion sustainable? What knowledge is being built into the institution? And what remains when the people doing that work move on?
5. Progression: Is it possible to move into positions with greater influence and decision-making authority?
Someone can enter a museum, feel included and remain there for years without getting any closer to institutional power.
So where does the career pathway lead?...
A permanent role?
A curatorial career?
A budget?
Seniority?
Decision-making authority?
Museum X and Culture&’s It’s About Handing Over Power found overwhelming frustration at the lack of progress within curatorial careers, including structural exclusion and a continuing glass ceiling. The report called for institutions to focus not simply on entry, but on retention, support and progression into senior roles.
This matters because power cannot be redistributed if people from marginalised backgrounds remain concentrated in temporary, junior, freelance or advisory positions.
Art Fund’s new Empowering Curators programme is one example of this research beginning to translate into practice. Developed in response to our collaborative report: It’s About Handing Over Power, and in consultation with us and Culture&, it creates multi-year curatorial roles for Global Majority professionals. Crucially, host museums are also required to undertake their own programme of organisational change.
That distinction matters.
Marginalised people should not have to become exceptionally good at navigating institutions that were never designed for them.
The institution needs to change too.
Otherwise, the pathway simply teaches people how to survive the existing structure rather than giving them the authority to change it.
Ask: Who decides when somebody is ready to progress? Where does the pathway actually lead? And does progression bring greater authority, or simply greater responsibility?
6. Authority: Can you actually change what happens next?
This brings us back to the question running underneath every stage:
Who has power here?
Suzanne Alleyne’s Neurology of Power describes power as something that permeates our relationships, rather than something that exists only within job titles or organisational charts.
That distinction matters.
Power is not simply who has the most senior role. It is also about who can influence what happens and who has meaningful agency themselves.
So perhaps authority is where we can test whether our pathways have actually changed anything. Such as:
Employment
It’s About Handing Over Power asks us to move beyond entry-level representation towards permanent employment, progression and positions where people can influence institutional decisions.
Being present is not the same as having authority.
Community participation
In To Whom Does This Belong?, Museum X worked with Black Voices Cornwall through co-design with communities helping shape it from the beginning rather than being asked for feedback once the important decisions had already been made.
Community needs could change editing, budgets, deadlines and processes. That is significant because participation has consequences.
If somebody can speak but nothing can change as a result of what they say, how much power has actually been shared?
Data
Power also sits in less visible places: catalogues, databases, terminology and decisions about access and reuse.
Through Black Beyond Data project, we have been working with Royal Museums Greenwich and descendant communities towards an ethical framework for Black cultural data.
Community participants became co-researchers, helping shape decisions around stewardship, ownership, compensation, privacy and how their knowledge is used.
Simply adding more Black histories into an institutionally controlled system does not redistribute power.
Who gets to make the rules?
And those responsibilities continue after the project ends. Relationships, trust and commitments cannot disappear when the funding or workshops finish.
Ask: Who can influence the outcome? Who has agency? Who gets the final say? And who lives with the consequences of that decision?
Conclusion: so a pathway to where?
Perhaps the career pathway is not simply evidence that an institution has created opportunities. It is a way of testing whether authority tangibly shifts as people move through it:
Invitation → Inclusion → Care → Retention → Progression → Authority
And throughout every stage:
Who has power here?
What does care require here?
Because an institution can sincerely say, “we care about this community”, while still deciding what can be discussed, what can be accessed, how long people have, what gets recorded, what gets published and which recommendations will be acted upon.
That is still care on the institution’s terms.
If heritage institutions genuinely want communities and marginalised practitioners to engage with them, they need to be prepared to do more than hearing diverse voices. it means giving them more power.
And allowing those voices to change what happens next.
So perhaps, as institutions we should reflect honestly on these questions to help prepare for what could happen next:
Who are we inviting in, and why?
What are we prepared to change?
And what responsibility do we have to the people we invite in?
To find out more about this work and the learning from the project, sign up for the Black Beyond Data: Working with Descendant Communities Symposium:
References and further reading:
https://www.rmg.co.uk/about-us/our-strategic-vision
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/741873
https://www.themuseumx.com/projects/it's-about-handing-over-power
