Museum Transformations: Pathways to Community Engagement

How can the institution of the museum become inclusive? This is an open-ended manifesto of the Inclusive Museum Research Network without seeking any constraining definition of the museum’s form or reach or engagement. Dr Lonnie Bunch asserted that while museums cannot simply be community centres, they have to be at the centre of their communities, framing what has changed and what needs still to be changed". The inclusive museum is an aspirational space that is created and recreated based on the context and relevance to multiple stakeholder communities. It liberates communities and institutions from legacies, enables the first voice, and empowers people of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds with a sense of place and multiple identities addressing intersectionality across cultural borders through appropriate capacity building. Connecting collections and communities is critical where the collections themselves are diversifying and evolving reflecting the multicultural populations beyond the binary of self and the other. The inclusive museum is the human face to globalisation.