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This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.

This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.

In this chapter, we reflect on ways that museums might, as Audre Lorde put it, take our differences and work through them as our strengths.¹ This has been a long-term project for both of us, starting from our individual positioning and alliances and situated knowledge(s) shifting over time and place, as we work in shifting institutional frameworks and with diverse collaborators globally. Overall, we reconsider our 2013 volume, Museum and Communities: Curators, Collections, Collaboration, with its geographical absences and silences, while addressing the complexity of identities and global entanglements within wider networks of power and control.² We ponder activist practice

'I ain't giving up

Over the past few decades museums have been undergoing significant changes in how they relate to their numerous publics. From monologue (producing narratives for) to dialogue (producing narratives with); from mono-vocal to poly-vocal, these changes in thinking and practice can be seen to coincide with (and to, in some ways, result from) increasing demands from museum publics to have a say in how ‘their’ museums function to serve them, as well as a critical reflection on museum practice from academics and museum practitioners alike.

As we write this essay, Donald Trump has been inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States, it is just six months after the Brexit vote, and just two months before the Dutch elections. Many commentators connect Trump’s win with looming electoral victories by Far-Right parties in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy. We argue that this particular moment in Europe is one of an anxious politics that testifies to a struggle with how to deal with the consequences of earlier colonial histories in contemporary society. This anxious politics “is characterized by heightened anxieties about the fate of the different nation-states that constitute Europe, and based on a projection of the ills currently imagined to face Europe . . . on to specific subjects, often racialized Others” (Modest and De Koning 2016, 98). After both Brexit and Trump’s wins at the polls, the United Kingdom and the United States saw a surge in claims to the nation by many who saw in immigrants and Muslims (among other minority groups) not just a burden to the nation but also a threat to its security and to its future. A virulent nationalism manifested itself. This nationalism is echoed across continental Europe in the rising popularity of extreme-right parties that have unified on an anti-immigration, anti-Islam,and anti-European Union platform.The Netherlands is no exception. Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party has had growing support and is predicted to garner the most votes in the March 2017 elections. The nationalist sentiments he propagates have long since become mainstream.