Positioning museums politically for social justice

ABSTRACT

The idea that the museum is a contact zone, a place for dialogue, inclusion and participation, is now widely accepted. Yet the growing urgency to address a number of social injustices around the world, the refugee crisis, social inequality and human rights violations among these, prompts us to reconsider the roles of museums in the twenty-first century from an active political perspective. This article discusses how museums can become advocates for social justice by adopting a political position against issues and forces that disrupt and deny equity to communities and individuals. If museums are going to act as agents of social change, they must first recognize the knowledge systems that have historically shaped their museological practices and then intervene to incorporate the diversity of knowledges that have been excluded. Based on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s work Epistemologies of the South, this essay concludes that by de-monumentalizing established knowledge regimes that have made the modern museum what it is today, museums can open up to a plurality of forms of knowledge and thereby become spaces of advocacy that can better facilitate colonized, racialized, marginalized and excluded communities to represent their experiences and memories, in their own terms, according to their own truths and values.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums
• globalization
• social justice
• museum epistemologies
• refugees

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Deniz Ünsal is a Museum researcher and lecturer. https://www.linkedin.com/in/denizunsal2016/