Nezka Pfeifer
Interdisciplinary Museum Content
Overview
My question is: What and how are the best ways to engage audiences online with interdisciplinary content? I was hoping to connect with other people doing this work in the museum field and figure out what steps I could take to implement these ideas in my own context and job, and, frankly, provide some much-needed infusion to my creative process.
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Why I Started This Project
My research question developed from my frustration in trying to do better and more engaging work for the public, when the usual expectations could not be realized, thanks to the pandemic. I’ve been working on multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary museum projects for many years, and found with the move to almost exclusively online programming, the best elements of this methodology did not always translate into the meaningful experiences that I’ve witnessed people having in-person.
Biggest Surprise(s) and Lessons Learned
My biggest surprise was that there was so much to learn about doing interdisciplinary work in museums! Most scholarship on this framework is within the academic setting, though museums are encouraged (thanks to funding agencies and educational goals) to use multiple disciplines in didactic projects, but it’s really quite rare to see museums address this work in theory—it happens almost entirely in practice (at least in the US anyway; Europe has more examples of this in theoretical scholarship). In my research, I learned more about the professional vocabulary of this work, but also the wide variety of projects and applications that my colleagues in the museum field have been doing for decades. For example, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary are three different (though related) frameworks to do the work that incorporates more than one academic discipline; museums have been doing one (or all) in these types of projects (often in exhibitions and programs) but many of them are not necessarily migrated online in the same way, or at all. Very basically, using exhibitions and curators to define these terms: a multidisciplinary exhibition is when one curator oversees the whole exhibition but includes several disciplines as informational layers in the larger narrative; an interdisciplinary exhibition has a project curator but they are bringing in specialists from other disciplines who come together and share their work to intersect their expertise(s) and thereby expanding the research to be presented in the exhibition; and a transdisciplinary project is when an interdisciplinary project is created with the addition of a community group who are both the actors and beneficiaries of the project experience, thereby offering yet another perspective on this intersection of expertise, knowledge, and people.
Most joyous realization? That all the respondents to my brief survey were so generous in sharing their projects, motivations, and process with me in answering my questions. The people who do this work are so committed and passionate for this model that it really revivified my drive to pursue and accomplish more of these types of projects. I also learned the wide variety of scale in which these museum people create, sometimes just by themselves, or with another staff person, and also of course in a larger multi-person team—all of which were inspired, engaging, and thoughtful.
The best lesson learned was that even if you don’t answer your research question exactly, the research you do on the way can be just as useful and elaborative of the knowledge you learn for future use. I had a tough time refining my question for the lab, but once I had it, I was really able to embrace the process, and step back from my expectations of what the interviews would bring. I don’t think I would have done anything differently, though I know now that the scope of this question was a lot larger than I could really answer in just a few months.
Findings and Unvanquished Uncertainties
The pattern I noticed was that there was only one unifying thing in each of the experiences of the people I spoke with: themselves. And more specifically their inherent personal drive to create this type of content for their museum/public. However, there was no one way in which they accomplished these different disciplinary projects. Also, frankly, only two people I spoke with had actually created online multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary projects, so there wasn’t enough information to fully answer my research question. I would say though that these conversations did increase my understanding that there is a lot more work that could be done to develop these types of projects, if the time and resources are available to do this kind of investigation and experimentation.
With all the interviews and related conversations I conducted during my research period, I found that there was not one way in how people created interdisciplinary content in museums. The biggest realization I had was that people who create these projects start with them as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or trandisciplinary projects; they don’t adapt and add them in the middle of the project, so it’s necessary to plan out the exhibition/program/website with all the players right at the beginning. Regardless of the project (exhibition, online site, or program), everyone I spoke with began their interdisciplinary work moving forward with all the people (and disciplines) they could include/think of, whether it was an exhibition, literary festival, mapping project, or professional training experience.
While I didn’t answer my exact question listed above, I learned a lot about the breadth of interdisciplinary work that people in museums are doing/making with the public. While most of the people I spoke with had not created online experiences, they were still doing (or had done) work using at least two disciplines engaging their communities; one of them was still in process so those projects will be getting launched at some point soon. This type of work also takes a lot of time and resources, but the people doing it are committed to the framework as the one that has so many possibilities, not just for sharing context, but also to create meaning, and engender more inclusive engagements with their publics. The question(s) that still remain for me are how to migrate this type of work to be a more engaging experience online and perhaps create a guide (in future) that will enable culture workers in future to do this work more often and more seamlessly.
Methodology
In identifying and refining my question, I wanted to focus on something that would have potential long-lasting impact on the type of work I want to do most in museums. Once I narrowed it down, I spent a great deal of time trying to find scholarship on how this work has been researched or written about, and then also trying to figure out what my research would consist of. I also was able to speak to a couple of curators who do this work, and learn more about their research and practice, and these conversations helped me a great deal to focus and also refine what I might want to learn. Thanks to Kyle and the MAP Community, I was able to use his newsletter and survey platform to find people also doing this work in museums and ask them for time to be interviewed, either via Zoom or a phone call. I hoped to reach 15 people—which I was able to—and had really thoughtful and provoking interviews with all of them, learning a great deal about what they had worked on, and what they were working on at that moment in time.
Nezka Pfeifer
Nezka is interested in how to represent as many disciplines as possible in museum exhibitions, and how to make them inclusive of the community where she lives and works. Currently, she is the Museum Curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO.