Reconsidering Conflict in Exhibition Development Teams

As team-based approaches to exhibition development become commonplace, museum managers and those involved in exhibition development struggle to find productive ways to understand and manage differences of opinion. Based on an ethnographic study of the design of a traveling science exhibition, this paper addresses the challenges of developing an exhibition as a team and characterizes the differences of opinion that arise, not as clashes of personal opinion or as differences in approaches to curricula, but as the inevitable result of communities of practice coming together to create something new.