Space, Gender, and Labor: The Case of Education in European Art Museums and Institutions

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25757/invep.v14i2.369

Keywords:

Museum and gallery education, Reproductive labor, Marxist feminism, Critical spatial studies

Abstract

Marginality and peripherality are redundant themes in the body of knowledge produced by critical museum and gallery educators across Europe. Drawing on a feminist spatial approach that permits to examine the politics of location in the museum as both actively implicated in, and an effect of, the process of gendering educational work as reproductive labor, the following article attempts to analyze the interrelation between the historical construction of museum education as a “feminized” practice, its subordination in the museum hierarchy and its physical peripheralization. This analysis allows to denaturalize implicit professional habits institutionalized over time. In considering repoliticized genealogies of museum and gallery education that resituate this field of practice within the history of social movements, this article also considers disobedient and imaginative strategies that take the aforementioned denaturalization process as a starting point for going beyond analyses and inventing other ways of instituting.

Keywords: Museum and gallery education, reproductive labor, Marxist feminism, critical spatial studies

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Author Biography

Joana Monbaron, Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra

Academic background in art history and Russian studies. She has worked as a subtitute teacher in high schools and as an educator and organiser in various contemporary art institutions in Russia and Europe. Looking critically at the structures of cultural institutions and the way they shape the production of legitimate knowledge, she has co-organised situated educational projects in (and from) the art world that aimed at reconsidering cultural and political categories. She is currently a PhD candidate of the programme "Human Rights in Contemporary Societies" at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. Her research focuses on existing efforts to relocate European modern and contemporary art museums within their colonial and anti-communist genealogies, and to reframe their role through the practical consideration of their direct social use.

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Published

2024-01-30

How to Cite

Monbaron, J. (2024). Space, Gender, and Labor: The Case of Education in European Art Museums and Institutions. Da Investigação às Práticas: Estudos De Natureza Educacional, 14(2), e369. https://doi.org/10.25757/invep.v14i2.369

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 2 (2024): Mediadores artísticos e culturais: que profissionalidade

Section

Artigos

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