Accounting for the museum

© 2017 GAPS. In this essay for the Journal of Social Work Practice I bring the practices of writing, reading, visiting, imagining and above all looking, to the forefront of a critical enquiry into museums. It’s part of a wider endeavour to use critical and creative writing to account for museums and to clear space for a different kind of writing. I am drawing together some reading and visits to art museums that I made in the summer of 2016, in order to think about the relevance that the work of museums might have for social work. I endeavoured to be in the museums and in the reading with a freely associative mind and imagination. The essay enacts the form of my fragmentary thinking whilst I was doing this