Welcome to the fifth issue of 2023. It has been a long, hot summer and the urgent demands for a coordinated response to global warming – an alarm sounded by among others the MMC’s Editor-in-chief emeritus Robert Janes in his Museums in a Troubled World (Routledge 2009) – seem to go unheeded, and the possibility of catastrophic climate change increases daily, with consequences to our common cultural heritage, which also includes the landscape. National governments continue to invest in promoting mass tourism, despite the effects of air travel on global warming, and encouraging disinterested museum-going as part of the post-COVID tourist economy. Visitor numbers are once again being cited as a measure success, instead of signalling an alarming rise in carbon emissions as tourists fly in greater and greater numbers to more and more remote destinations. Every time our heritage is damaged, destroyed or placed at risk – whether through wars that include the ongoing conflict in Ukraine or climate change – we all suffer the loss. Every time we accept mass tourism as a justification for museum activity, we become accomplices in the destruction of the planet. As a journal aimed at supporting reflective practice, we cannot stand back from the issues the world is currently facing. For those new to the journal, Museum Management and Curatorship, now in its 38th year, remains one of the world’s leading journals for museum professionals. When the journal was originally founded it was explicitly intended as a resource for museum practitioners. Museums and museum professionals need high-quality academic research on which to base new projects and inform current practices, and new methodologies to help critically analyse their success or failure. The MMC remains and will continue to remain grounded in museum practice in all its geographical and cultural diversity. The MMC is one of the few truly international museum journals. It continues to publish contributions from around the world, and is an important platform for scholars and professionals for whom English is not a first language. The MMC is not and cannot be a news magazine, but we are always looking at how best to respond as a journal to the current world situation and its challenges to the museum mission, while still retaining the scholarly rigour of a peer-reviewed journal, which by its nature takes time and increasingly patience, as peer reviewers become harder to find. As a consequence, this issue is dedicated to the research that has emerged in the aftermath the COVID 19 pandemic, which otherwise risks being eclipsed by the ongoing work being done on repatriation, colonialism, inclusion and collections management, which will be the subject of future issues of MMC. As always, we invite all of our readers to contribute to our ongoing reflection with their own ideas by writing to the team at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you, and to working together to ensure the MMC continues to meet the needs of the entire museum field.
