Self-Censorship in Science Museums

From Museum 2.0, a marvelous blog I discovered last night:

Self-Censorship for Museum Professionals:

There are lots of things visitors can't do in museums. But what about the things that museum professionals can't (or feel they can't) do? This week at the ASTC conference, Kathy McLean, Tom Rockwell, Eric Siegel and I presented a session called "You Can't Do That in Museums!" in which we explored the peculiarities of self-censorship in the creation of museum exhibitions.

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1. Self-censorship is different in different museum types. In science and technology centers, there are some "can't"s that are alive and well in other museums. For example, "Nazi science" came up several times as a "can't"--but the Holocaust Museum's Deadly Medicine exhibition was a successful project that didn't bring the walls down. And while narrative-based museums have long dispensed with the concept that museums present a neutral point of view, science centers still feel that their trustworthiness rests on their objectivity. This is not to say that science centers are more censored than art or history museums--every kind of museum has its own hang-ups. Imagine an art museum that allowed patrons to bang on the exhibits the way you can in a science center.
2. Focusing on youth audiences can lead to heavy and sometimes inappropriate self-censorship. Our desire to "protect kids"--which reflects twenty years of clamping down (at least in the U.S.) on kids' freedom--keeps science and technology museums from hard topics and edgy presentation styles. As Eric said at one point, "kids--our target audience--are living in a world of things they choose to consume that is so full of sex, so full of irony, so full of subjectivity, and when they come to the museum it is one of the few places in the world they don't see that stuff. And so my question is, why are we keeping them away? Why aren't we developing our audiences?"
3. Science is political, and science museums have a hard time grappling with that fact. Tom compared public perception of racial intelligence to that of sexual orientation, commenting that over the last thirty years, the left has advocated to have racial intelligence categorized as nurture and sexual orientation categorized as nature. The right advocates for the opposite. The way we think about science--and possibly the way we do it--is connected to our political leanings.
4. Museum professionals don't have the tools to make wise decisions about when and why to self-censor. Many people mentioned the intelligent design/evolution debate, raising examples of angry homeschoolers and religious groups. Few were able to articulate a response policy that wasn't based entirely on the volume of the ire raised. If you do offend, ask yourself--who do you offend and why? Do they have a valid claim or not? Do they represent a major constituency or not? One woman shared an anecdote about a label at a zoo that suggested that humans are crowding out elephants. She was pleased to receive angry letters about the label. It let her know that people were reading it and cared.

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Over 100 participants contributed post-its to the comfort map (shown at right) with examples in the categories of "safe," "iffy," and "no way." As you can see, most of the examples were in the iffy category--the hazy borders of our comfort. To that end, I have captured the examples on the post-its in five categories, separating the "iffy" layer into three categories (creatively named 1, 2, 3). Here are the words that came up on the comfort zone map:

Read the whole thing....