Dr Helen Graham

Profile

I am interested, fundamentally, in how we organize ourselves. I investigate this question in two interlinked ways, through collaborative and interdisciplinary participatory and action research and through experimental writing, seeking forms for understanding and generating modes of political life.

I have developed this concern and these methods in relationship to museums and heritage – through action research projects such as How should heritage decisions be made? (2013–2015), Bradford's National Museum (2017–2021) and Congruence Engine (2020–2023) – and also in relationship to place and local democracy through large scale public engagement processes that I co-facilitated with architect Phil Bixby, My Castle Gateway (2017–) and My York Central (2018).

The relationship between action research and experimental writing cohered through writing Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s Affective Work (2025). Through combining a series of registers – critical, affective and speculative – I worked through my experience of facilitating participation in and with museums in order to draw out why participation in museums has often generated conflict, disappointment and anger.

The book’s argument is that the difficulties produced by adding participatory practice to museums arise from political incompatibility. In the representational liberal logics that underpin museum decision-making, trustees and professionals make decisions ‘on behalf of’ future generations and the public. This is a political infrastructure the book names ‘museum constitution’. Conversely, participation arises from ideas and practices from direct and horizontal political traditions, drawing those of us who act as facilitators into new relationships and expanding political imaginations.

Writing Deconstituting Museums enabled me to articulate the ways in which ‘museum constitution’ is a political formation in which I had become trained and had trained myself, a kind of habit. Based in impossible to realise ideals (access for all; conservation forever), tensions in missions (between access and conservation) and motived by abstract constituencies (everyone, humanity, the public, future generations), ‘museum constitution’ becomes animated by the impulse – one I have repeatedly had – to put up your hand and take responsibility for access, inclusion and diversity, which in turn constantly circuits energy and attention back towards the institution and reform. The process of writing the book became an act of retraining my reflexes in order to be able to be more responsive to what I term ‘participatory worlding’, the new possibilities for being together and organising ourselves that arise during the doing of participation.

Giving form to the political quandaries of institutionally-located participation – and retaining my reflexes – has significantly shifted my approaches to facilitation and will shape my next set of participatory and action research projects. In particular I will now approach all participatory and action research projects with some new co-ordinates: participation thrives through detaching from liberal norms, by making space for what matters and has meaning to be directly negotiated. Participation is not a mode of engagement it is a mode of governance, there are a myriad of techniques for participatory organising that enable those directly concerned to act, to follow their energy and, where necessary, take decisions. Participation is world-making, through exposing yourself to affect others and in turn to be affected, what the world is and might be also changes.

These insights are very practically active in my involvement with YoCo: York Central Co-Owned, which emerged out of the My York Central public engagement process and is focused on steward the public vision into a built reality by develop a co-owned neighbourhood underpinned by redistributive economic design.

I am also in the very early stages of a new writing project concerned with experimenting with forms for enlivening the composite nature of heritage. Where writing will act as a method for evoking and intervening in the ways in which heritage holds together, often fuzzily, a variety of things such as liberal logics of rights and recognition with conservative impulses of duty; expertise with democracy; economics with affect; materiality with meaning; time with place; political agency with constraint.

Responsibilities

• Director of Research and Innovation

• Bradford’s National Museum
• Developing a Co-Produced, Digital and Living Archive of Learning Disability History
• Heritages and Utopias: Possibility Thinking for Living Together
• My Castle Gateway

Student education

I teach on the MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies, MA Arts Management and Heritage Studies and MA Curating Science.

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Critical Studies in Museums, Galleries and Heritage

Current postgraduate researchers

• Elena
• Solvig Choi