Access, accessibility, diversity: A three-dimensional model of institutional inclusion in museums based on historical evidence from the Boston Museum of Science (USA) (1940–2000)

Inclusion has become a central commitment in contemporary museums, yet the term often describes heterogeneous practices without distinguishing the logics through which they operate or the inequalities they address. Building on prior work that has applied Nancy Fraser's (2009) theory of redistribution, recognition, and representation to museum inclusion, this article develops a three-dimensional model—access, accessibility, and diversity—and tests it through a longitudinal archival analysis of the Boston Museum of Science (USA, 1940–2000), treated as a paradigmatic case. The three dimensions emerged unevenly and frequently coexisted: access expanded institutional reach, accessibility reconfigured the museum around disabled visitors’ embodied and sensory needs, and diversity – the dimension requiring redistributed institutional authority – remained least developed, recorded as commitment rather than structural change. By grounding this disaggregation in six decades of institutional evidence, the model offers a framework for evaluating what inclusion achieves and where its limits lie.