Flourishing in Museums: Towards a Positive Museology

Flourishing in Museums presents the Flourishing Museum Framework, an interdisciplinary model for reflection and practice. Illustrated via a diversity of international examples, the framework demonstrates how museums can meaningfully address the many challenges facing the profession.

Including contributions from a wide range of scholar-practitioners working across the arts, humanities, sciences, education, business, and mental health disciplines, the volume uses abundance-thinking and takes a strengths-based appreciative approach to museum purpose, function, and being. The book demonstrates that, even within the most difficult climates, abundance-oriented methods and perspectives can inspire and elicit flourishing in visitors, staff, and communities, thus positioning museums as places where people find meaningful and purposeful work and where visitors find satisfaction, meaning, inspiration, and motivation. Drawing from the disciplines of positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship, contemplative studies, and museum studies, the book is unified and organized into six thematic areas that comprise the Flourishing Museum Framework: courage, transformation, care, optimism, gratitude, and delight.

Flourishing in Museums will be essential reading for academics and students working in the museum and heritage fields, as well as the cognate disciplines of arts management and creative industries. It will also be useful to practitioners working in museums and heritage sites around the world.

Kiersten F. Latham, PhD, is the President & CEO of Sauder Village, a living history museum complex in Ohio, USA.

Professor Brenda Cowan is an educator and former chairperson at SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology in the graduate Exhibition & Experience Design department.