Communities of disagreement in the museums

The efforts for diversity and inclusion in museums during the last decades have revealed a need for knowledge and competence on how to handle disagreement and opposition. This paper shows how Lars Laird Iversen’s term communities of disagreement can be applied in museums, and examines his claim that disagreement, under given circumstances, can have a unifying effect. The study is based on discussions from a project where a network of eleven Norwegian museums participated, and on the author’s own attempts to implement communities of disagreement at his own workplace. Iversen’s model has proved useful but requires conscious adaptions that correspond to the complexity of the interface between the museum and the audience.The efforts for diversity and inclusion in museums during the last decades have revealed a need for knowledge and competence on how to handle disagreement and opposition. This paper shows how Lars Laird Iversen’s term communities of disagreement can be applied in museums, and examines his claim that disagreement, under given circumstances, can have a unifying effect. The study is based on discussions from a project where a network of eleven Norwegian museums participated, and on the author’s own attempts to implement communities of disagreement at his own workplace. Iversen’s model has proved useful but requires conscious adaptions that correspond to the complexity of the interface between the museum and the audience