The Museum As a Space of Social Care

This book explores the realities and potentialities of museums as spaces and agents of social care. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including professional insights, this book explores the social function of the museum. It provides a theoretical overview of how the ‘caring museum’ might be conceptualised, exploring how museums promote and engage with communities, co-curation, well-being and affect, and the political, social and economic imperatives to these activities. This book offers new theoretical insights and practical understandings into what the role of the museum is, what it can be, and what it ‘ought’ to be, in contemporary societies.

Nuala Morse currently works as Project Researcher for an Arts Council funded project focusing on museums’ health and wellbeing programmes at the Whitworth Art Gallery and Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, in partnership with University College London, UK.