Negotiating Museum, Academia & For-Impact Partnerships
Around the Tok Panjang emerged from a unique collaboration between GEN, NUS Baba House, and the National University of Singapore (NUS), bringing together academic, museum, and for-impact spaces.
We invite Clara Ang, former Programmes Manager at NUS Baba House and now Senior Manager (Programmes) at National Museum of Singapore, to reflect on the 2022 series. Clara’s passion for community-building and her academic and pedagogical expertise shape her human-centred approach.
This recollection piece serves as a reminder of the unexplored discussions on gender and the collaborative potential between diverse sectors, emphasising the power of cross-disciplinary efforts in fostering inclusive engagement with heritage and identity.
Could you describe and explain some of the programmes that emerged from this three-way partnership?
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The tour ran from August 2022 to December 2022. We had different editions - for the public, for NUS (held during recess/reading week), and for a module collaboration (with NUS Associate Professor Kamalini Ramdas’ Geography graduate class called Geography and Social Theory (GE5216)). We also organised post-tour conversations using the GENerally Speaking card deck. For this, we onboarded students from NUS who were interested in topics pertaining to gender, and GEN provided a one-day training for the student facilitators to lead the post-tour conversations.
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This came in the form of fireside chats and panel discussions. Two of them were in collaboration with GEN where Vivian Lim, founder of GEN, was a moderator and panellist.
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This was a collaboration with TEDxSingapore for the 2022 TEDxWeekend
What sparked this unique partnership between NUS Baba House, NUS, and GEN?
As a university-based heritage house, there was a push towards presenting the house in a historically-accurate manner informed by research. Additionally, we were also thinking hard about student and staff involvement as NUS Baba house is such a great teaching, learning and research resource. On the other hand, the NUS Baba House has always been engaging with the wider general public, so we wanted to push out a programme that was relevant to the community. So in ideating a museum-wide series, I had to think about how to bring together these different aspects. When GEN approached me and explained that they wanted to make conversation surrounding gender applicable to the Singapore public, we began to think of how to programme these in a sensible but exciting manner.
Which aspects of working with the different stakeholders and communities did you enjoy most?
Each stakeholder and community that I worked with throughout the course of the Around the Tok Panjang series had something different to offer in terms of their opinions and practices.
I particularly enjoyed the Women and the Baba House tour edition with Dr Kamal’s class as the session weaved in thinking-behind-the-design aspects, where we were honest about the challenges in coming up with the Around the Tok Panjang series. The prescribed reading for that module for the visit was Foucault and Butler, so it was exciting to unpack the house and the programme using these lenses. For Foucault, we discussed the triad of Knowledge/Power/Subject, and situated the museum and university as institutions that hold power to produce knowledge. As for Butler, it was a great tool to think about the notion of intersectional aspects of identities and the fluidity of gender vis-a-vis the tour and programming content.
Throughout the course of the series, I also appreciated the plurality of opinions from the public. Because this series of programmes was designed to be interactive and inclusive of the views of different communities, we had many dialogic aspects which allowed me to see a wide spectrum of opinions from the public. For instance, we conducted post-tour conversations for the Women and the Baba House tour, and also put up a community wall which participants were encouraged to pen down and share their experiences and reflections on.
One of my favourite reflections by a tour participant would be this: “I think my biggest takeaway from the conversation would be the significance of intersectionality in the context of agency of women” [pictured]. This quote sums up quite neatly what we were trying to prod the participants to think about: that we need to look at power through specific contexts, and thus how we can rework power through negotiations.
Interestingly, through conversing and interacting with the wider public, the student facilitators were also able to reflect on their own approaches when it comes to thinking through, and speaking about gender. For instance, one facilitator shared about the importance of uncovering opposing viewpoints and discussing them meaningfully: “these conversations go best when there are opposing or differing points of views. Often we are in echo chambers that share similar views to ourselves, but this does nothing to further conversations in the wider community. Sharing, expanding, and articulating our own viewpoints in a way others understand allows us to do better for future conversations on gender and tackling blind spots we may have in our understanding.”.
I think these conversations between different participants and the student facilitators were particularly important in the setting of a university heritage house. Being embedded in the wider university, there might be a tendency to discuss social issues in a very academic way at all times. It is therefore important to design programmes where different voices can intersect, so that important topics remain accessible to a wider audience.
What do you think were some of the challenges and subsequent negotiations involved in helming a collaboration between stakeholders from the museum, university and non-profit organisation?
For the programmes’ publicity, as well as the scope of the content for the talks, Vivian and I spent long hours discussing how and where to pitch the narratives. The programmes were meant to be a platform for the convergence of different audiences: students and researchers in NUS and other Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs), communities interested in conversations around social identities, and the larger audience vested in heritage conversations. In trying to bridge these different audiences, we had to be very conscious and tactful in the way we presented the materials. While she initially felt our content was too academic, I was careful not to oversimplify. Through our discussions, we negotiated and sought to understand where each of our organisations were coming from and learnt from each other how to best place the programmes.
Moving forward, how do you think we can better bridge the gap between educational institutions, institutions of heritage, and non-profit organisations? Or what future possibilities do you envision?
I think institutions and organisations must be open to experimental collaborations. Heritage institutions need to explicitly include such partnerships into their engagement strategies. I see museums as a nexus for these collaborations, particularly if they have the physical space and a good range of collections to activate conversations. Non-profit organisations and educational institutions bring in the diverse or targeted audience, the personnels and volunteers, as well as the specific know-how or interventions.
However, I recognise the various challenges: securing budgets, wo(man) power, and ensuring sustainability. The different stakeholders need to establish common understandings and good practices for longer-standing collaborations. This is because with a longer timeline, we can gather valuable data to benefit the broader ecosystem, and also work through more than one iteration to strengthen the programme. I look forward to seeing more museum and heritage leaders supporting experimental ways of collaborations, and increased fundings to support such new programmes.