You are here.
This phrase allows us to situate ourselves in the museum space, a map we often turn to in moments of uncertainty. When the way forward feels murky, or when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. A guide does not erase uncertainty, but offers orientation, familiarization. This is a guide assembled from multiple voices: artists, scholars, critics, educators, workers, and visitors-each marking out a section of the museum from where they stand. Some entries move with institutional knowledge, others push against it. Some map what exists, others
imagine what could be. Taken together, these contributions form a constellation-one that might help you find your place, or reconsider it altogether.
Guide To { ... } is for anyone engaging with museums today, whether at the very beginning of your career, years into it, or peering in from the margins. It is meant to be revisited. A guide does not expire when we memorize the route; it waits patiently, until the landscape shifts and we realize we need to peer into its blueprint.
Across its pages, this issue considers what it means to witness with care, to critique with precision, to sustain with integrity, and to disrupt with purpose. You will encounter questions that expose the museum as a site of power, and others that imagine it as a space of care, repair, or abolition. Along the way, the familiar rooms of the museum may shift.
{Introduction}
by Ivanka Suska
9
You will move through Visitor Experience, Exhibitions, Directors and
Development, Collections and Archives - not as separate areas, but as
overlapping terrains.
In moments of change or crisis, when the museum reveals its futures
and fractures, a guide can offer perspective. A guide is a reminder that
you are not lost, even if you find yourself in unfamiliar territory.
You are here.
Which direction will you be guided to next?
Molly Fulop is an Educator at Wrightwood 659 and an Educational Psychology doctoral student at the University of Illinois Chicago. As a Graduate Research Assistant for The LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project, their emerging research explores the impacts of LGBTQ+ intergenerational collaborative artmaking.
Therese Quinn, Director of Museum and Exhibition Studies and Affiliated Faculty with Gender & Women's Studies and Curriculum Studies, has worked as an exhibit researcher, developer, and evaluator for the Field Museum of Natural History, the Chicago Children's Museum, the California Academy of the Sciences, and other cultural institutions. She received National Endowment for the Humanities (2018, 2017) and Fulbright (Finland, 2009) awards; coedits the Teachers College Press Series, Teaching for Social Justice; is an elected representative of the faculty union, UIC United Faculty; and is a founding member of the Illinois Deaths in Custody Project (IDCP), Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE), and Teachers Against Militarized Education (TAME). Her most recent books are School: Questions About Museums, Culture and Justice to Explore in Your Classroom (2020, Teachers College Press) and Teaching Toward Democracy: Educators as Agents of Change, 2e (2016, Taylor and Francis), and she has published articles and other writings widely, including in American Quarterly, the Journal of Critical Military Studies, the Journal of Museum Education, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education, and Rethinking Schools.
