Date: 14 September 2015
Time: 4:30pm – 6:00pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 7, Cheng Yu Tung Building, CUHK
Speaker: Dr. Janet Marstine (University of Leicester)
Commentators: Prof. Ho Hing Kay Oscar (CUHK); Ms. Wen Wen (Hermark Culture, Beijing)
Registration: http://goo.gl/forms/CgNPdOkHST
Abstract
In our rapidly changing world museums face increasing demands to engage with complex ethics issues that go beyond a simple ‘right and wrong’. Museum ethics is among the most pivotal concerns of museum professionals in the twenty-first century and is central to all areas of museum work. However, the predominant late-twentieth-century approach to ethics as professional practice, which relies on ethics codes revised perhaps once a decade and authored by like-minded individuals, behind closed doors, has proven to be a constraining factor, rather than an enabling process. For museums to reach their transformative potential as agents of change, they must embed in their very fabric a changing concept of museum ethics.
This talk argues for a revitalization of museum ethics that is founded on the convergences among a triad of modes: codes; values and principles; and case studies. Through their complementary, interlinked nature, together, these three modes have the potential to empower individuals and groups to engage in ethics discourse leading to informed and responsive ethical decision-making. As a member of the Museums Association (MA) Ethics Committee, which is currently rewriting the MA code of ethics, I will share some of the insights that have emerged from our collaborative process of rethinking ethics, particularly the ways we are drawing upon the three modes of codes, values and case studies. I will also discuss the concept of living, breathing codes that change as the needs of society change.
We are currently on the threshold of change in which the social role and value of museums will become increasingly significant. The new museum ethics is a catalyst that can help museums to cross this threshold. Understanding the confluences among values, case studies and codes has the potential to help museum practitioners recognize the benefits of self-reflective practice through the lens of the new museum ethics. Clearly, embedding the new museum ethics is challenging work. But regulation per se is not an adequate response to the ethics quandaries of the twenty-first century. To develop a level of comfort with ethical decision-making based on a range of social concerns is to accept the complexity and dynamism of ethics discourse that both reflects and shapes the real issues that museums encounter.
About Speaker
Janet Marstine is lecturer and academic director in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester where she researches new approaches to museum ethics. She is editor of the Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics (2011) and co-editor of New Directions in Museum Ethics (2012). Her monograph Critical Practice: Artists, Museums, Ethics will be published by Routledge in the fall of 2016. She currently holds a British Academy grant, in partnership with Oscar Ho at Chinese University Hong Kong, to study censorship and self-censorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong exhibition spaces. Dr. Marstine sits on the Ethics Committee of the Museums Association. From 2007-2010 she was Founding Director of the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University.
All are welcome. First-come, first-served.
Jointly presented by MA in Cultural Management and Centre for Cultural Studies, CUHK