STS Meets the Academy of Museum Studies at the Science & Technology Center
Controversy in the museum was one topical component of ‘Science & Technology in Public Places’, a collaborative lecture & seminar course between the University of Amsterdam, newMetropolis Science & Technology Center, and the Reinwardt Academy (for museum studies). From our discussions, three issues emerged for inspired museologists, as did a future project for science & technology centers and museums, currently keen on displaying public debate and socio-scientific controversy.
1) Controversy in the Museum: The elementary distinction between ‘stirring controversy’ and ‘displaying controversy’
As Peter van Mensch of the Reinwardt Academy explained, when the curators at Ellis Island removed from their walls graphic pictures of atrocities committed in Armenia in the 1910s, the move stirred controversy. One could say the museum was ‘white-walling’ history in an effort not to offend sensitive (family) visitors. It upset individuals and organisations who for any number of reasons rely on the kind of memory work Ellis Island had been performing. That ‘controversy in the museum’ is quite distinct, we argued, from putting on a display of, say, ‘the global climate change controversy’. In the latter case, the issue is the controversy itself - the different sciences, viewpoints, interests and methods that inform, indeed make, the controversy.
We felt it important to add that a museum’s display of a controversial issue could itself stir controversy, both inside and outside the museum. Some years ago, as we all remember the Robert Maplethorpe photo exhibition stirred controversy. (Cincinnati and the artistic spat with the National Endowment for the Arts come to mind.) A decision by a museum to hold that exhibition would stir public controversy and its reporting in the press, as could an exhibition about the Maplethorpe controversy, especially if it contains the most ‘explicit’ photographs.
It was remarked that controversial exhibitions often bring in increased numbers of visitors. ‘The controversial’ sells. Whether ‘controversy displays’ sell is not very well known, we gathered. From this inquisitive viewpoint, it’s unfortunate the Smithsonian did not display, Historikerstreit-style, the Enola Gay exhibition controversy, alongside the fuselage with simple text.
2) The Museum Takes a Stand: The distinction between the ‘museum as pillar of society’ and the ‘museum as just another voice in society’
Addressing the question whether the museum should take a position on a controversial issue, we felt it necessary first to tease out some of the underlying assumptions made about the museum’s place in society. In part, the discussion followed from a lecture of mine given on the distinction between the ‘gentleman’s truth’ and the ‘tradesman’s truth’ (made by Daniel Defoe and written up in S. Shapin’s A Social History of Truth), as they relate to the ‘sponsored exhibition’ in the ‘revered institution’. The leading example given in the lecture was the (London) Science Museum’s display of the channel tunnel controversy, sponsored and clearly informed by the positions on the key issues taken by Eurotunnel. [1] It was argued that the gentleman’s truth-telling museum displayed the ‘trademan’s truth’, for the curators’ starting points and frames of reference were Eurotunnel’s. The example given in the seminar was somewhat less subtle. It concerned (again) the Science Museum’s clear stand in an exhibition a few years ago against second-hand smoking, which stirred controversy inside and outside the museum. (We read a quotation by one Science Museum commentator saying, “This must be the first time that the museum has maliciously condoned the victimization of 30 per cent of the adult population.” [2]) Those in class who generally felt a museum should not take a stand, ever, seemed to view the museum as revered institution, as a pillar in society, above scientific politicking, while the others, less troubled about taking a stand, seemed to view the museum, revered or less so, as just one voice, among many others in society. In addition, the former thought it possible to be ‘objective’ and tell the ‘gentleman’s truth’, while the latter had their doubts.
3) Timely controversy: The distinction between the newspaper and ‘popularised science praxis’ as source
If the museum were to choose to display controversy (as opposed to merely stirring it, Maplethorpe-style), the epistemology of controversy becomes a major issue. Questions surrounding how to display a controversial issue arose from a point made by Patrick Boylan (University of the City of London) in his lecture on ethics & commerce in the museum. He felt that the Exxon Chairman’s statement to the effect that man-made climate change is a myth has no place in an exhibition on global climate change, thereby upholding implicitly the notion of a museum dedicated to gentleman’s truth as opposed to the trademan’s. (Whether the Chairman’s statement has a place in an exhibition on the ‘global climate change controversy’ was not raised explicitly.) Others felt such a viewpoint should be central in any exhibition on climate change, implicitly stating that any exhibition on global climate change is (also) an exhibition of the global climate change scientific controversy. Gradually, consensus emerged that different viewpoints should be present in any exhibition on climate change, and these should be ‘balanced’.
Underlying the plea for a ‘balanced presentation’ seemed to be a respect for the ‘journalist’s method’, where ‘both sides of the story’ are told. Another assumption, it seemed, was that controversies are newspaper & TV controversies, and, in addition, newspapers are the places to turn to in order to distill the issues and interests. Here a plea was made to discuss and think through the newspaper’s type of account, and (along the way) read such works as D. Nelkin’s Selling Science. Keeping in mind the Science Museum’s subtle trademan’s truth-telling exhibition on the channel tunnel, I found it important that skills be gained in ‘mapping debates on issues’, i.e., studying, thinking through and rendering the positions, interests, and the different scientific methods used to arrive at different facts, often reflecting the positions and interests. In other words, the elementary point was what counts as ‘the science of climate change’ is disputable within science.
It also was noted that the museum also should think through when and why a debate closes, for a somewhat tardy exhibition on a controversial issue could only reopen an otherwise closed debate. Reopening closed debates is a political act, and the museum could be implicated in the controversy. (The politics of the historical science exhibitions was taken up in a lecture by Gaby Porter, of Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry) Opening a controversy may be distasteful for those of the ‘museum as pillar of society’ school. The notion of a ‘tardy exhibition’ should be touched on, for tardiness could be equated with the disappearance of the controversy from the newspapers. Debates and controversies, however, may be festering quietly, only to explode occasionally in newspapers. Below I return to how this rather central point may be brought to light in the museum.
4) Controversy on Display: Dynamically rendering a sociologist’s account of public scientific controversy
On a somewhat personal note, the usefulness of developing debate and issue rendering techniques in general and for the museum specifically was brought home to me recently in my attempt to get a better handle on the global climate change controversies, in the run-up to the Kyoto meetings. (Having discussed it in class for the previous two weeks, I coincidentally was asked to write two articles on the issue for the International Herald Tribune, with a very tight deadline.) As many increasingly do these days, I immediately turned to the world wide web for a quick picture of the positions, and more specifically to the sites of Greenpeace, World Wide Fund for Nature, Friends of the Earth, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In keeping with the reiterated empirical finding (communicated in a class lecture by Brian Wynne) that public trust in the truth-telling abilities of NGOs is holding steady (as that in national governmental and corporate experts continues to decline), I supposed my list of groups to turn to didn’t reveal some particularist bias.
In attempting to obtain some idea of the debate, I found that only the Friends of the Earth’s site (www.foe.org.uk/climatechange/) has links to the ‘nay-sayers’ and ‘sceptical scientists’, including three recently formed coalitions funded (primarily) by car manufacturers, oil producers, chemical firms and electricity companies, one of which with the apt or indeed ill-chosen acronym ICCP, for International Climate Change Partnership, potentially to be confused with the IPCC. Apart from FOE’s web-typical and simple list o’ links, no site gave anything approaching a general picture of the debate. Each organisation kept to its own positions, occasionally referring to (but not linking) others’.
Thereupon I returned to one idea sketched last year in an article ‘The Future of Science & Technology Studies on the Web’, i.e., the development of ‘evolving discourse sites’. [3] I now believe it could be the first step in developing an exhibition on controversy; it’s also an exhibition in itself, potentially available to any museum all the time.
The discussions began in our seminar on ‘virtual science centers’, with the lead question ‘Are Science Centers Doomed by the Net?, which was raised at the First Science Centre World Congress at Vantaa, Finland in 1996, in conference papers we read by James Bradburne (of newMetropolis), Drew Ann Wake and others. In our web seminar, we found that science centers generally add little value to their institutions through their web sites; they largely only weakly mirror what’s inside the buildings, allowing us to conclude in the least that some institutional web sites may very well doom their institutions. (In particular the students picked on the Hong Kong Science Center’s site. [4])
After class a number of students and I discussed the idea of evolving discourse sites, or dynamic debate maps on the web. Questions arose as to the amount and timeliness of the information on the web, or whether indeed the positions taken by the key actors and organisations on issues are present. It’s certainly worthy of study across issues, but from the climate sites at least I felt fairly confident that the salient issues and relevant actors were all very much present. I also didn’t find the issue of overimportance, for we could just as well dub it the ‘climate change debate on the web’, one debate site or location among many.
The debate or discourse sites (we thought) could have at least three layers: the debate map, depicting (creatively, in an ‘image map’) the issues, positions and actors. For climate change, one could begin with the various stands taken on proposed greenhouse gas emission rate reductions, which range from ‘business as usual’ scenarios (e.g., by the Australian Government) to drastic declines (e.g., by Greenpeace). The second layer of the site would be internal pages, or our own material collected on the ‘Science(s) of Climate Change’, while the third layer would be hot links to the major players. With this third layer, the debate site would be ‘dynamic’, for the major players continually update and revise their positions. If previous positions have been saved (in more internal pages on the site), the debate site also would include an ‘archaeology of the controversy’, interesting for researchers and visitors alike. (Such an archaeology also could reveal that ‘controversy’ had or had not continued while the established print and broadcast media were less interested.) Thus, instead of going to the newspapers for the controversy, as so many museums seem to do, we would go to the sources, continually. We also thought most any socio-scientific debate could be so web-rendered. Plans are now afoot to make a small series of such sites.
I will note here that the climate change sources, from Greenpeace over the IPCC to Shell, have ‘popularised’ their positions on climate change in their initial web pages, and many of the popularisations come back in their longer pieces, deeper in the sites. The popularisations are sometimes used there as headings and catchwords (easy to remember and to communicate as short-hand references), reflecting the point made in the lecture by Ulrike Felt of the University of Vienna that ‘science’ and ‘science popularisation’ cannot be separated. [5] (She argued that popularisation is a ‘creative act’ that feeds back into the ‘science’ and vice versa, on and on.) Thus, in making the discourse sites, the museum needn’t ‘popularise’ the debate or controversy, and thereby potentially implicate themselves in it. That popularisation job’s been done by the actors and organisations themselves. Seen from this perspective, the museum would capture and render conflicting ‘popularisations’ and the sciences and interests behind them.
Finally, while it is also worthy of study, I will assume for the time being that the museum as revered institution enjoys (as NGOs) a rather high level of public trust in its ability to generate credible knowledge claims. If it is to live up to that reputation while indeed taking on controversies (and not merely making them to make money, as was pointed out, also by Boylan in his ethics & commerce lecture), sociological debate mapping and rendering skills leading to dynamic controversy maps available world-wide could very well be a promising way forward.
Notes
See Rogers, R., “Managing British Public Opinion of the Channel Tunnel,” Technology & Culture, 36 (1995), 636-640.
See Mintz, A., Communicating Controversy: Science Museums and Issues Education, Association of Science-Technology Centers, Washington, DC, 1995.
See Rogers, R., “The Future of Science & Technology Studies on the Web,” EASST Review, June, 1996, pp. 25-27.
The other complaint concerned sites primarily designed for high-end computing; we had difficulty accessing their full breadth and scope, in a two-hour seminar. The one (low-tech) site we found which added value to the institution was that of the International Museum of Surgical Science, at www.imss.org, with its Interactive Antique Illness challenge.
A shortened version of her lecture was published as Felt, U., “De relatie tussen wetenschap en haar populaire representaties,” Tijdschrift voor Wetenschap, Technologie & Samenleving, 5, 4, 1997, pp. 132-135. A volume on the entire lecture & seminar series is in the works.