Co†Curation and the Public History of Science and Technology

In October 2010, the Science Museum in London held a three-day international workshop to discuss how science and technology museums use their collections and represent the history of science, technology, and medicine for today’s audiences. This was the first outward manifestation of the museum’s Public History of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (PHoSTEM) project, and was designed to launch discussion of its main themes. At the heart of the workshop’s concerns was the kinship of two phenomena: public history and co-curation. In broad terms, “public history” can refer to the ways in which lay people pursue historical interests—whether that be family and local history, collecting, consuming historical magazines and television programs, or museum visiting—for fun. Co-curation and similar techniques gathered together under the umbrella of “participation” describe a range of practices in which lay people work to develop displays and programs within museums.1 The workshop was convened to explore—via a series of sessions, plenaries, and “provocations”—the relevance to the history of science of public history and co-curation used together. The gathered audience of international and British delegates and Science Museum staff debated different facets of these core ideas, in the context of the history of relations between science and the public; experiments with new media; and especially reports of co-curating experiments and practices at home and abroad.