This project examines the uneven adoption of therapeutic initiatives within the organizational field of American museums to ask: How do people frame museum-going as “good” for visitors’ health? Existing research on legitimation processes would predict cultural institutions respond similarly to pressures for greater accountability from their external environments, or resist utilitarian justifications to preserve their autonomy. More than resigned acceptance of an instrumental policy trend or defensive arguments of “art for art’s sake,” I argue responses to museums’ “therapeutic turn” reveal the multiple, and often conflicting, ways people negotiate the worth of aesthetic worlds. Ethnographic study of how museum staff develop programs for visitors with disabilities across two art museums and two botanical gardens reveals this process unfolds at the level of sensory experience, and demonstrates its effects. Such experiences vary across places, mediating organizational conventions; among people, creating group boundaries that maintain and challenge social differences; and by practice, in which objects afford different uses and interactions differently framed as healing. These findings have implications for how sociologists study the interpretation of culture and health, the regulation of bodies, and the politics of access and inclusion.

Last modified

• 12/20/2019

Creator

• Gemma Mangione

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N29H5C

Subject

• Sociology

Keyword

• disability
• senses
• therapy
• accessibility
• art museums
• botanical gardens

Date created

• 2016-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright