Auto agents: Inclusive curatorship and its political potential

This chapter explores the inclusion of new voices and perspectives in the museum via inclusive curatorship, a facilitated approach that enables a diverse body of people to be curators. It provides an example of inclusive curatorship with learning disabled people. The chapter also explores curating as a means of disability activism, one which exploits the potential for curatorial practices to communicate the opinions, desires and concerns of learning disabled people to new audiences. It describes the exhibition’s central theme of autonomy in relation to the two seemingly disparate sites of self-advocacy and curatorship. The chapter explains autonomy as a contested idea and then demonstrate how the complexity played out and became visible during the curation of Auto Agents. Through the Auto Agent Bob activity, the curators were able to see that curating was much more complex than they initially thought. The methodology used to develop interpretation for Auto Agents illuminates the participatory and relational potential of curating.