AIC's 47th Annual Meeting

The public face of conservation has transformed over the last several decades in response to both external shifts relating to the role of heritage institutions within society, and internal shifts in the profession itself which call for greater visibility, advocacy and collaboration. For the conservator, communicating with the public has become one of the core responsibilities of the profession and is seen as fundamental to the development and long term survival of the field. To this end public engagement and outreach activities have become ubiquitous within the profession, with the fundamental “goodness” of public engagement being effectively incontestable. But what does deep and meaningful engagement with the public look like? And how is “engagement” different from other forms of communication, consultation, or promotion? This paper seeks to explore the historical development of conservation outreach and to critically discuss the nature, purpose and efficacy of a range of popular outreach approaches. The dissertation highlights how the establishment of a “specialist” territory from which engagement activities with “non-specialists” can be coordinated can unwittingly result in programmes which focus more on advocacy for the profession than engagement with non specialist communities. Building off of the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement’s two-way model, the potential for a “bottom-up” two directional exchange between conservation and the Maker Movement and Do-it-Yourself (DIY) community is explored with a view to addressing current limitations in dialogues between conservators and the public.