‘Such endings that are not over’: The slave trade, social dreaming and affect in a museum

The paper explores Social Dreaming (SD) as a method for understanding the affective responses to one of the exhibitions that marked the bicentenary of the 1807 Act that abolished the British slave trade, Breaking the Chains: The Fight to End Slavery, at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (BECM) in Bristol. It asks whether SD can serve the evolving purposes and mission of museums and their role in society. The theory and practice of SD is described and findings are interpreted from a psychosocial and Deleuzian perspective. Finally the value and potential of SD is discussed as a process for attending to audience reactions to disturbing exhibitions

Object Relations in the Museum: A Psychosocial Perspective

This article theorises museum engagement from a psychosocial perspective. With the aid of selected concepts from object relations theory, it explains how the museum visitor can establish a personal relation to museum objects, making use of them as an ‘aesthetic third’ to symbolise experience. Since such objects are at the same time cultural resources, interacting with them helps the individual to feel part of a shared culture. The article elaborates an example drawn from a research project that aimed to make museum collections available to people with physical and mental health problems. It draws on the work of the British psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion to explain the salience of the concepts of object use, potential space, containment and reverie within a museum context. It also refers to the work of the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas on how objects can become evocative for individuals both by virtue of their intrinsic qualities and by the way they are used to express personal idiom

Remembering the buildings of the British labour movement: an act of mourning

This paper outlines the buildings of the British labour movement. Hitherto, labour activists, historians and heritage professionals have focused on the artefacts and archives as opposed to the many historic buildings of the labour movement. The narrative closely follows the course of the industrial revolution and the accompanying development of the labour movement from its beginnings in the eighteenth century. Examples cover a wide range including the artisan trade societies, Utopian Owenite settlements and purpose-built radical and trade union premises. The authors make a brief critique of the paper itself as an example of the intangible heritage of the labour movement. It concludes with a consideration of why these buildings are relatively neglected and suggests that the notion ‘don’t mourn, organise’ might contain some clues as to specific reasons for their neglect