Crafting Museum Social Media for Social Inclusion Work

Book excerpt: Crafting Museum Social Media for Social Inclusion Work investigates if and how social media can be integrated into the social inclusion initiatives of museums, and the contextual factors that impact this integration. Drawing on a year‐long case study of Glasgow Museums (Scotland), international mini case studies, and interviews with museum professionals, Kist reveals the complex social and technical negotiations that staff participate in to align social media practices with social inclusion work. Kist argues that the staff practices she observed around social media can be usefully understood through the idea of ‘craft’. This reframes staff practices for imagining future museum social media work as iterative, intuitive, and skilled balancing acts. As a craft, staff creatively draw on and work around social media affordances to balance the norms of their social inclusion work with the perceived interests and needs of users and community groups. Understanding the relation between museums’ use of social media and their ability to contribute to social inclusion initiatives is imperative, especially given the increasingly pervasive use of social media across the cultural heritage sector in recent years. Crafting Museum Social Media for Social Inclusion Work will be valuable for academics, practitioners, and students working in cultural heritage, museum studies, or social work.