Empowering the Future of Museum Professionals: Johns Hopkins University’s Commitment and Practice in Museum Studies in the 21st Century
Date：2023-06-16
During the third dialogue of the China-Europe-America Museums Cooperation Initiative, Dr. Sarah Chicone, Director of the Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Management graduate programs at Johns Hopkins University, emphasized the transformative potential of museums in fostering inclusive dialogue and cross-cultural understanding. She underscored the need for museums to actively engage in meaningful exchanges that address contemporary challenges. Museum studies programs, such as the one at Johns Hopkins, are instrumental in preparing professionals who can navigate these complexities. Through their global curriculum, diverse faculty, and immersive onsite seminar course, the programs cultivated a community of practitioners dedicated to inclusivity, social justice, and community engagement, empowering them to shape the future of museums in the 21stcentury.
Dr. Sarah J. Chicone is the Director of the Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Management Graduate Programs in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Advanced Academic Programs at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Chicone has worked professionally and academically in Museums and Cultural Resource Management and previously served as the co-chair of the Museum Studies Professional Network of the American Alliance of Museums. She has 20 years of professional experience as lead curator, developer, and designer for natural history, science, anthropology, contemporary art, and history exhibitions. Her academic and professional interests include cultural heritage, material culture studies, cultural resource management, informal education, exhibition design, and public archaeology. She has published across the museum and heritage sector on issues of outreach, exhibition design, and academic pedagogy. Dr. Chicone received her PhD in Anthropology (Archaeology) from Binghamton University, where she worked as part of the Ludlow Collective. She also holds an MA in Anthropology (Archaeology), a graduate certificate in Museum Management from the University of South Carolina, and a BA from Lake Forest College.
Full text of the speech
Hello, my name is Sarah Chicone, and I am the Director of the Museum Studies and Cultural heritage management graduate programs in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. When I was invited to contribute to today’s session, I thought quite a bit about the theme — museums as cultural intermediaries in the dialogue between civilizations— and the role of the museum as a platform for cultural exchange. I considered what it meant be a platform, to be a place where exchange happens, a site of intercultural dialogue.
Museums are not simply passive reflections of the times but are agents in shaping our understanding of now. Museums have molded public discourse on history, science, and art for centuries. They have been participants in global projects of colonization, willing agents in endeavors of nation-building, and the keepers of cultural patrimony. But the people who walk through their doors are individuals. As such, they are also personal sites of identity formation, memory, and meaning-making.
The 21st century has seen museums shift to extend themselves beyond repositories to engage in understanding for today and for tomorrow. Museums are asking questions about their audiences, about the history of their collections, and about their role and purpose in society. These are important questions, these are timely questions, and these are hard questions.
But they open us to the opportunities on the other side, which among others, involve a more inclusive institution.
Preparing emerging museum professionals for a world increasingly divided by politics, economics, climate, and culture, it is important to demonstrate the utility of the institution in creating cultural understanding through dialogue and exchange. This is key to fulfilling the vision of thought leaders like Lonnie Bunch that squarely place the museum at the center of community.
For today I thought a bit about what that means in the context of the broader field of Museum Studies or Museology. We have always been a discipline that straddles the boundary between theory and practice. Intradisciplinary in our approach as we engage in academic inquiry anchored in doing. We are a student-centered field mindful of our impact, especially in light of the historic role of the institution and its potential future.
We have seen institutions begin to reimagine their community relationships while reaching out to become more inclusive. This expansion of our understanding of purpose has potentially profound implications for the museum moving forward.
Museum studies programs have an important role to play in shaping the field. We need to be humble in our approach to this responsibility while acknowledging our impact.
The Johns Hopkins University’s museum studies graduate program has over 1000 alumni working in institutions across the US and abroad.
A part-time graduate degree program designed for the online space, we offer students the opportunity to work in the field while pursuing their degree. In a single course, I may have students from India, Singapore, France, and the US all in the same digital classroom. Sharing their professional experience and learning from not only me but also, and perhaps more importantly, each other and creating peer networks that transcend boundaries.
Our commitment to diversity and cultural exchange is echoed in our curriculum, our onsite seminar course, and the work of our faculty.
Currently in our 15th year the program has been intentional in maintaining a global perspective.
One of our five defined program learning outcomes includes: analyze museum practices, theories, and methodologies through the lens of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion.
As such we are intentional in our inclusion of multiple voices in theory and practice. Incorporating authors representative of diverse perspectives and international approaches, as well as diverse case studies that offer broad perspectives on challenges facing institutions today.
One of the program’s customizable core courses is a class on the history and philosophy of museums. At face value, this seems benign. But this class takes an intentionally global perspective to the development of the institution and does not limit the exploration to Western paradigms or Western definitions. From cabinets of curiosities to historical monuments and sites of memory, the course surveys museum history from a global perspective to examine how the institution has changed over time and the moment we find ourselves in. Other courses in the program have included Museums in Global Perspective and Museums of the Americas, to name just a few.
Beyond offering courses on museums in a global context, technology has enabled us to include guest lectures from museum practitioners and scholars from around the world. Our students are able to hear from their international colleagues about the diversity of work being done globally.
In addition to our efforts across our asynchronous curriculum, we have worked to increase student exposure to cultural exchange through our onsite seminar course. The one required on-ground course in the program. We have been able to use this onsite field course to explore how museums move beyond their walls to reimagine relationships with their communities. It has offered us an invaluable opportunity to collaborate with our colleagues in the US and abroad and for our students to learn from the global community of museum professionals.
We have held the 10-day field courses in London, Barcelona, and Berlin, and will be in Modena, Italy this coming summer. These courses are not tourist excursions but opportunities for us to connect our students with museum practitioners in our host city and through our host institutions to find commonalities in professional experience and new approaches to global challenges. The seminar includes practicum opportunities in a variety of museum settings, conversations with local museum professionals, and class sessions that integrate daily experiences. Using the rich diversity of museums in the designated location, the course provides students with the chance to use what they have learned in their prior courses, develop networks with fellow students and museum experts, and explore the latest in museum practice.
In addition to our curriculum, we are also able to draw faculty with a diversity of experiences furthering the opportunities for cultural exchange. Over 70% of our courses are offered by adjuncts who are practitioners in the field working in institutions in a variety of capacities mostly across the US but also abroad.
The field is undergoing significant changes, and the responsibility of museum studies programs in preparing the next generation of emerging professionals for the challenges of the 21st century is heavy.
Community is central to the work being done, and museum studies programs are tasked with developing a community of museum practitioners that prioritize cross-cultural exchange and collaborative approaches to the challenges of the 21st century.
Projects of decolonization, inclusion, social justice, and community engagement require professionals that are knowledgeable empathetic, and collaborative, who are able to work across borders and across cultures to fulfill the promise these institutions hold. The future is in the hands of our students, and we take that responsibility very seriously.
Thank you for your time today. I hope convenings like the one today continue to expand our conversations in the field.
Related Posts
Connecting culture through design: Writing, typography, and visual identity
