The ‘co’ in co-production: Museums, community participation and Science and Technology Studies

In this essay, I will approach museums both via their glass display cases and via the particular capacities offered by the term ‘co-production’. In doing this I will draw on two genealogies of co-production. The first is focussed on the political question of how public institutions and their publics might better collaborate. It is this ‘public policy’ variant of the term which has most explicitly influenced the use of the term ‘co-production’ in museums. The second comes from Science and Technology Studies (STS). ‘Co-production’, according to Shelia Jasanoff (2004, p 43), was first used in STS by Bruno Latour in his 1993 book We Have Never Been Modern. It has since been widely elaborated to argue that ‘the realities of human experience emerge as the joint achievements of scientific, technical, and social enterprise: science and society, in a word, are co-produced, each underwriting the other’s existence’ (Jasanoff, 2004, p 33). Both mobilisations of the term ‘co-production’ – though in different ways – are concerned with opening up political potentials by indicating a variety of ‘cos’, a plurality of entities interacting in variable ways and with variable, and always political, effects.

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