Climate Museums UK: a contemporary response to the earth crisis

ABSTRACT

This brief offers a peek inside the mission, journey and approaches to programming within Climate Museum UK, an emerging mobile and digital museum that stirs and collects responses to the climate and ecological emergency. It begins by describing the creative and socially engaged practices of our founders, which have taken shape as a museum focused on climate at a time when extreme weather events and climate activism dominate the news. Six principles that guide our programming are used to describe some of our activities, including pop-up museums, workshops for educational audiences, digital projects, and training for professionals. Referring to our desired outcomes for people and the planet, it describes some successful experiments so far, as well as the challenges we are facing. These challenges correspond to those that hamper climate action: the enormity of the issues, the various shades of climate denial, and the impacts of the wider ecological emergency.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums
• climate
• possitopian
• ecocentric
• extractivism
• emotion
• conversation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Bridget McKenzie is a researcher, curator and educator. She has been director of Flow Associates since 2006, following 14 years in roles managing cultural education, including as Education Officer for Tate and Head of Learning at the British Library. She founded Climate Museum UK in 2018 and co-founded the Culture Declares Emergency movement in 2019.

Notes

1 The Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG), the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester launched the Activist Museum Award in 2019. It is for an individual or group working in/with museums to support the research and development of an activist project that reflects the ideas presented by Robert Janes and Richard Sandell in their 2019 book, Museum Activism.