From Access to Uptake: Cultural Policy Pathways for Youth Participation in Community Museums

Public institutions often improve nominal access without generating sustained cultural uptake among younger audiences. Focusing on a temple-embedded community museum in Bangkok’s Ladkrabang district, this article develops a policy-oriented account of youth participation through a 10-month ethnographically informed qualitative case study. Repeated site visits, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with youths, museum staff, and local officials were analyzed through constructivist grounded-theory procedures. Three interlocking frictions emerged: affordability and distance, weak interpretive fit with everyday youth lifeworld, and the absence of phone-first engagement cues. The article translates these findings into a low-cost 6-12-month toolkit combining flexible pricing and transport partnerships, curriculum-linked school collaboration, youth co-curation, and QR-based micro-tours. Conceptually, it advances digital habitus as a manager-usable heuristic for understanding how platform-shaped dispositions condition museum uptake. By situating a Thai community-museum case within wider debates on cultural policy, audience development, and small-museum governance, the study offers transferable but bounded pathways for resource-constrained institutions across Inter-Asia.