The annual American Alliance of Museums conference will be in Seattle, WA this year May 18-22.

Here are two sessions that aren’t on the official program, and one that is.

Pop-Up Session on The Empathetic Museum

Look for information on the time and place beginning on Saturday, May 17.  One can only sign up for a Pop-Up session on-site, so once I have secured a time slot on the sign-up panel next to the Unconference Room I will tweet and email about the day, time, and location of the room.

The session last year generated quite a bit of interest, and a number of folks asked that we organize a new conversation for this year. If you want to take a look at my series of posts about this subject, they are collected here.

Depending on the time I’m able to reserve, several colleagues who have ongoing projects related to The Empathetic Museum will be at the session:  Curator of the “Dear Boston” Exhibition  Rainey Tisdale ; Dana Mitroff Silvers, who runs workshops on design thinking based in empathy; and Janeen Bryant, educator at The Levine Museum of the New South,

250 of the many pairs of running shoes left in Copley Square. Featured in the “Dear Boston” Exhibition.  Photograph by Tiffany Locke.

Museums, Politics, and Power

This is a new website and blog connected to a Fall 2014 conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.  The conference is being organized by ICOM groups in the US, Germany, and Russia and explores the intersections of museums and the public sphere, especially in these troubled times in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  I hope to be posting a guest blog soon.

Linda Norris, blogger at The Uncatalogued Museum and one of the St. Petersburg conference organizers, will be leading sessions related to issues of museums and politics at AAM.  A number of museum colleagues from Linda’s work in Ukraine will be there as well.  Linda details opportunities to meet them in her latest post. This seems like a unique opportunity to talk about museums’ roles in troubled times.  One session is scheduled for the International Lounge on Monday at 2 pm.

Panel on Design’s Impact on the Visitor Experience

 3:45 pm on Sunday, May 18

Finally, wearing my other hat, as Editor of the museum journal Exhibitionist, I invite you to join a conversation with five authors from our Spring 2014 issue, Intentionally Designed Spaces.  They’ll be talking about the approaches they use to think about design in ways that directly affect and enhance the visitor experience. You can find the table of contents and three of the articles online at Exhibitionist online on the NAME website.  This session is listed in the official program.

If you’re a reader and you see me at AAM, please say hi. And if you won’t be in Seattle, stay tuned for reporting on some of these sessions here.

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Thanks