The Social Impact of Community Participation and Co-Design in a Museum

In partnership, Imperial War Museum (IWM) and University for the Creative Arts (UCA) are offering a Collaborative Doctoral Award for a PhD candidate to be embedded in IWM's Participation Department. There they will develop research into audience social impact within the museum, nourishing and deriving new thinking from a live project involving visitors (actual and virtual) to examine in detail the impact of a ground-breaking new season - The Unmaking of the British Empire, planned for 2025.

Through an exhibition, public programme and associated events, the season will explore the period of the end of the Second World War to gaining of independence by several of Britain's former imperial territories.

The PhD will be a practice-based opportunity to examine the role of community engagement in a participatory co-design process and what different forms of social impact result. The candidate will work cross-departmentally, understanding audience participation through how IWM's Participation Department's programming intersects with Exhibitions, Curatorial, Design, Customer Services, Volunteering, Visitor Experiences, and Audience Insight.

During the PhD the candidate will observe at close quarters how the co-design model is devised and implemented; assess how it is realised in the exhibition, public programming, events, and web-outputs; and help design the audience impact research (including participatory forums).

The project questions what shared Imperial history means and aims to surpass an understanding of recent contested history. The supervisory team believe coloniality has not ended but is ongoing, and therefore decolonial challenges faced by museums are also enduring. This project will develop understanding about audience participation in decolonising museums as a practice and gain new understandings of contested history, which significantly contributes to the work of decolonisation now and in the future.

To support this, the supervisory team will draw on combined teaching and research practices that foreground inclusive design and programming. The exhibition and public programming will be co-designed

with community groups who will inform the creation of the season through a full engagement with the history and relevant collections. The project will also move beyond co-design towards the development of a toolkit for sustainable co-creative processes of programming, engagement, and governance, which would be a useful and scalable community-led document for use across the GLAM sector.

The toolkit would facilitate inviting public and community groups to engage and co design with the museum and offer opportunities for effective community ownership and leadership. Within the supervisory team a critical activist research approach exists in the areas of contemporary design history, creative pedagogy, and knowledge making. This offers a robust investigative framework for the PhD candidate in this process to empower communities in moving beyond co-design and towards community leadership.