Article on Philadelphia’s “Black Docents Collective” published in Museum and Society

Gareth Millington and Irteza Mohyuddin have published an article on Philadelphia’s ‘Black Docents Collective’ in the academic journal Museum and Society. The article is titled: ‘History, Healing, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia: Going into the City with the Black Docents Collective’

Here is the abstract:

During the COVID-19 lockdown of summer 2020, docents at the African American
Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) decided that if the museum could not open,
they would move their educational practices into the city and online, organizing
tours and talks, and producing digital resources, working collaboratively under
the name of the ‘Black Docents Collective’ (BDC). Based on qualitative interviews
with docents, this article makes sense of the BDC’s work, specifically in relation
to their mission statement to heal the Philadelphia African American community.
In particular we aim to understand the urban imaginaries of healing evoked by
docents: what kind of city and communities do the BDC hope to create? What
kind of public sphere is necessary for healing to take place? We suggest that
docents’ urban imaginaries of healing go beyond cultural recognition and envisage
healing as necessitating a redistribution of resources historically denied to Black
Philadelphians. In addition, BDC claim the right for healing to take place within a
Black “counterpublic”, of which AAMP already performs a constitutive role. The
article contributes to academic debates concerned with the African American
museum as well as literature on the topic of wounded cities.

You can access the article here: https://journals.le.ac.uk/index.php/mas/article/view/4420

If you can’t access the article and/or would like to read it in pdf form please email gareth.millington@york.ac.uk