THE SIXTH ISSUE OF FIHRM-AP - Collaborations with Communities: ICSC Workshop
Participants at the workshop themed “Building Effective Collaborations: Museums, Communities and Human Rights” held at the National Human Rights Museum (NHRM) on November 8. (Photo by FIHRM-AP)
Author: An Chen, Student at the Graduate Institute of Museum Studies, Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA)
Collaborations with Communities: ICSC Workshop
In the practice of human rights advocacy, how museums and human rights organizations identify their target communities to work together is key to community participation. Featuring “Building Effective Collaborations: Museums, Communities and Human Rights”, a workshop was held this year amid the FIHRM-AP annual conference. Linda Norris, Senior Specialist of Methodology and Practice at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (ICSC), was invited as the facilitator to lead discussions where participants were asked to look in-depth into the communities they have been working with and human rights issues being worked on, so that they would better understand how to make use of the resources at hand to initiate community participation.
ICSC was established in 1999 as a network of historic sites, museums and memory initiatives. Through global and regional collaborations, efforts are made to mark the scars of the past, which, in turn, could be lessons learned to facilitate modernized human rights movements. As a senior specialist, Norris leads multiple projects at ICSC; for instance, Maison des Esclaves (the House of Slaves), Africa’s first world heritage site. Norris also explained different approaches to facilitate community participation and human rights advocacy by sharing a few projects by ICSC.
Participants figured out their target communities, with geography, identity, and affinity taken into account. (Photo by FIHRM-AP)
Know yourself, before you know the communities!
“Where are you from? What kind of food reminds you of home?” Norris kicked off the workshop with this question. On the one hand, participants learned more about each other, and it served as a warm-up for them to think about ways to approach a community. They started from describing who they are and self-identity to further re-examine the meaning of a “community”. The question is - what is it exactly? A community can refer to a group of people gathering together with complexity and having a particular characteristic in common, and there are three fundamental elements: geography, identity, and affinity. Taking into account the three elements, coupled with each institution’s mission statement, geographic location, and historic context, participants identified the target communities that they have been collaborating with, as well as those not yet with a partnership. For instance, Assistant Professor Phrae Sirisakdamkoeng from Faculty of Archaeology in Silpakorn University, Thailand, shared that the Thai military is a community with which a partnership has never been formed; there are few chances to start a dialogue, due to the power imbalance. A curator from Taiwan’s NHRM, for another example, mentioned that NHRM has been working for a long time with victims during the White Terror Period, and NHRM is now engaging children’s communities to encourage human rights education among children and to promote new concepts to the public.
Norris explained the Ladder of Citizen Participation, with each ascending rung representing increasing levels of participation that move from manipulation and therapy to informing, consultation, and placation to partnership, delegated power, and citizen control. (Photo by FIHRM-AP)
With target communities spotted, building trust will be the key to seamless collaboration. For this, Norris introduced the Ladder of Citizen Participation proposed by Sherry Arnstein. There are different levels of participation starting at the bottom where a community has no participation and is only subject to a one-way flow of information under manipulation and therapy; in the next level, there are degrees of tokenism with counterfeit power, such as receiving information and expressing opinions through consultation, where a community has a certain degree of influence in decision-making; in the final level, there is a partnership, where a community has delegated power to make decisions and lead the group. After introducing this model, Norris had the participants think about which level their community collaboration is currently at. Norris concluded this part by emphasizing that museums and facilities should not position themselves as providers nor decide what resources the communities need; instead, they should create practices with the community.
Taking the initiative! Bringing museums closer to communities
In the second half of the workshop, Norris shared innovative approaches adopted by different museums in addressing human rights issues. One example is Last Address, a civic initiative in Russia. Operating according to the motto “One name, one life, one sign,” the project commemorates the victims of repressions in the Soviet Union under Stalin. A commemorative plaque is installed on the buildings and houses that are the last known residential addresses of those arrested; the plaque comes with the information on the repressed person: his or her name, profession, date of birth and death, and date of exoneration. In this way, the project promotes human rights education to the public and shows that wounds of the past never truly heal over time, but instead, they leave scars till present days. Another example would be Youth for Peace in Cambodia, a community memory initiative that brings together young people today and survivors from the Khmer Rouge (Red Khmer) regime, as they transform mass killing sites into centers for dialogues, remembrance, and peacebuilding. The project even organized art workshops that allowed the survivors to tell their suffering through painting, and the works were then displayed to the public in exhibitions and shows, connecting past struggles to today’s movements.
Participants in group discussions shared community engagement plans they designed for their own facilities. Director Pooja Pant of Voices of Women Media concluded the group discussion where the group members talked about the possibility to reach out to perptrators when thinking of community engagement. (Photo by FIHRM-AP)
Having heard different practices, the participants discussed in groups how to engage communities that are less often involved in collaboration projects. Director Pooja Pant of Voices of Women Media concluded the group discussion where the group members talked about the possibility to reach out to perptrators when thinking of community engagement. That being the case, the circumstances of perpetrators vary from place to place, so there can hardly be a cure-all. Some participants also pointed out that perpetrators have always been a group that is difficult to reach amid community participation. On that, Norris mentioned a case in a prison in Siberia where prison guards and prisoners were invited to sit down to talk to one another; this idea became food for thought for the participants that day.
Conclusion
With the growing attention on community participation, as suggested in the new museum definition for 2022 by ICOM, an issue that museums have been working on is how they could adopt diverse perspectives through community participation and collaboration to promote human rights initiatives, when there are endless human rights violations going on at present. With this workshop, participants learned to find communities related to their own museums and they have acquired principles and methods of establishing a partnership with communities; practices and ideas on community collaboration were exchanged to foster more innovative approaches to be put into practice.