Museums and the Working Class

Adele Chynoweth has earned her living as a shop assistant, cabaret performer, night club DJ, call centre operator, union organiser, public servant, and teacher in secondary schools and adult vocational education. Adele also studied theatre direction at the Flinders University Drama Centre and completed her PhD with scholarship support. Adele was a Lecturer in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University where she received the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Public Policy and Outreach in 2018. In 2020, she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia.

Introduction - ‘Which Side Are You On'? Towards Meaningful Attention to Class in Museums
Adele Chynoweth

Part I - Shut Out: Access and the Working Class

1. ‘A Permanent Civilising Effect’? The Impact of Reforming Working-Class Museum Visitors in Liverpool during the Nineteenth Century
Alexander Scott

2. How British Museums Have Failed the Working Class
David Fleming

3. Seat of the Muses or the Moolah? New Working Class Demands on Elitist Archival Practices
Silvio Tamaso D’Onofrio

Part II - Shut Up: the Struggle to End the Silence

4. ‘One and All’? Retrieving South Australia’s Forgotten Labor History
Philip Payton

5. ‘Go and Take a Look at Millie Now’: Murder, Tattooed Remains, and Museum Ethics in Quebec
Jamie Jelinksi

6. Museums in Late Populist Democracies: the Photographic Archive and the Working Class
Paolo Magagnoli

7. Women´s Work in Coastal Galicia: Shining a Light on the Unseen at the Marea Museum
José Manuel Vázquez Lijó

Part III - Know Your Place: Site-Specific Narratives

8. Erasure of Working-Class Heritage in Conservation Plans: Absent Presence in the Walled City of Lahore
Rabia Nadir

9. Eugene V. Debs' Museum and the Preservation of Radical Working-Class Political Memory
Wesley R. Bishop

10. Keeping Your Head Down at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum
Adele Chynoweth

11. From Factory to Museum: The Obliteration of the History of Resistance
Meral Akbaş and Özge Kelekçi

Part IV- Answering Back: Lessons from the Working and Poverty Classes

12. Looking Backwards, Planning Forward: ‘Museum as Muck’ Advocating for the Working Class in Museums
Michelle McGrath, in conversation with Adele Chynoweth

13. Changing Lives at the Scottish Maritime Museum
Martin Hughes

14. House of Memories: Care and Equality in the UK Museum Sector
Kerry Wilson

15. Ngintaka Songline Tracks in the Museum
Diana James