Holly Bee
Thesis Title: How do socially engaged staff manage their personal values and emotions within museum organisational cultures?
This research uses a feminist lens and the theory of everyday life to explore how socially engaged museum staff manage their personal values and emotions within their organisational cultures. Despite largescale sector campaigning for equality, representation, and redistribution of power, it is continuously difficult for many museums to enact internal change as bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions. This research privileges the emotional knowledge and lived reality of socially engaged staff to address this challenge, asking how change is advanced and impeded in daily interactions in the museum workplace. It uses creative, compassionate, semi-structured interviews with museum workers, constructed around a felt doll representing the participant’s body and inner world, on which they capture their embodied, emotional experiences in visual and sensory ways.
Sub-questions for the research are:
• What emotions arise in socially engaged museum staff in their everyday working life? What causes these emotions and how do they feel in an embodied sense?
• In what ways do museum staff negotiate space for their personal values and emotions within their organisations? How do they feel about this process?
• What identities do socially engaged staff develop through negotiating their personal values and emotions with the organisation?
• What traits do socially engaged staff foster in organisational cultures to facilitate social justice and change-making?
This research aims to emphasise the importance of personal values and emotions to organising in order to create routes for developing socially just museums that embed and nurture the values, wellbeing, and identities of staff.
Biography
Holly (she/her) is a PhD Student at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, studying emotion, feminism, values, and organisational culture in the heritage sector. She is passionate about heritage engagement as a means to justice, compassion, and radical change, as well as fair and fulfilling employment in cultural professions. She holds an undergraduate degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic from the University of Cambridge and Masters degrees in Museum Studies and Social Science Research from the University of Leicester. Prior to her PhD, she worked for three years with GEM (Group for Education in Museums), providing CPD and support for museum educators. She is committed to finding kinder, replenishing ways of producing academic and creative work and to contributing to her professional community. In 2021-2, she was Co-Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal edited by the PhD students of the School of Museum Studies, Museological Review 26: Museums and Healing, and is involved with cohort representation and her department EDI working group. In her spare time, she volunteers at her local Brownies, reads indie comics, and watches way too many Halloween movies.
Publications
"Editorial: Museums and Healing" (and editor-in-chief work)
Museological Review 26, October 2022
"Police museums' silence on brutality opens questions of state power in the sector" (opinion piece)
Museological Review 25, June 2021
"On My Bookshelf" (opinion piece)
Museums Journal (Museums Association), April 2019
"Including audiences and embracing talent: sharing learning from the Cultural Inclusion and Creative Bridges conferences, 2018"
Journal of Education in Museums 39 (GEM), January 2019
"GEM Case Studies Special Edition: The Learning and Sharing Centre: Overview of the Learning and Sharing Centre Project; Learning and Sharing Events; What Comes Next?" (and editorial work)
GEM Case Studies 22, November 2018
"The Power of Education, 19-22 June 2017, Paris"
Journal of Education in Museums 38 (GEM), January 2018
"Book Review: 'Museums, Moralities and Human Rights', Richard Sandell (Routledge, 2016)"
Journal of Education in Museums 38 (GEM), January 2018
Public Engagement
"Loving Up to Our Potential: the role of sex education in advancing social justice agendas in the museum" - Conference: Exhibitionism: Sexuality at the Museum, December 10th 2021
Other Research Interests
Feminist and Queer research, especially into everyday life, heritage, community organising, and work. Caring alternatives to Capitalist systems.
Memberships
Fellowship Royal Society of Arts, Museums Association, GEM (Group for Education in Museums)
Museum Studies
University of Leicester
2019 Cohort. 1+3
www.linkedin.com/in/holly-thwaites-bee
Supervisory Team
Dr Nuala Morse
Prof Richard Sandell
Dr Rosemary Shirley