Museum Funding as Critical Practice

Authors

Camille-Mary Sharp, Western UniversityFollow
Samantha Summers

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 2-16-2025

Journal

Museums & Social Issues

First Page

1

URL with Digital Object Identifier

https://doi.org/10.1080/15596893.2025.2465592

Last Page

25

Abstract

While museums face an unprecedented amount of public backlash over their financial partnerships with donors and sponsors from harmful industries, the administrative practices of funding and fundraising remain understudied in museum scholarship. Responding to growing polarization between museums and stakeholder groups like artists, activists, and cultural workers, this article highlights findings from recent interviews with museum professionals about their funding-related practices to explore how professional perspectives can enrich current debates over ethical funding. Despite the structural difficulties posed by neoliberal museum models and government austerity, we argue that museum studies can work towards improving the field’s financial challenges by considering funding as a critical practice of museums that is just as deserving of research, discussion, and reform as the object- and education-based practices currently dominating scholarly conversations of ethics and decolonization.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Citation of this paper:

Sharp, C. M., & Summers, S. (2025). Museum funding as critical practice. Museums & Social Issues, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/15596893.2025.2465592