Abstract

This is an interview with Lisa Yun Lee, which was conducted on October 20, 2023 in front of a live audience at the Imagining America conference in Providence, Rhode Island. In this interview, Lee focuses on her approach to reckoning with the history of public policy histories in the contexts of Chicago museums including the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the National Public Housing Museum. Both of these museums have considered the ways that social policies have been shaped by movements and government and resulted in a wide range of both redistributive resources and restrictive policies that shape Chicago and the larger national context. In these settings Lee has both reinvented existing museums and built them from scratch using deep and collaborative community engagement tactics. The interview was conducted, recorded, transcribed, and edited by Daniel Tucker.