Critical consciousness, heritage, and the shape of museum practice

Abstract

As I approach my ninth and final year as the Editor of Curator: The Museum Journal, I reflect on the remarkable journey of the past decade. We've experienced extraordinary growth in readership and a shift in our editorial board to better represent our international readership. Initiatives like a multilingual translations program and updated ethics policies, especially recognizing community members involved in participatory action research as authors, are now part of our core values. In 2023, we also concluded a 2-year study with Drs. Rafie Cecelia and Theano Moussouri from University College London that now provides guidance to authors on how to write detailed figure descriptions that enhance accessibility to screen readers for our online content.

Throughout my tenure, we've seen consistent growth in contributions that rigorously assess museum practice and theory through larger scale comparative studies. While my concern about the dominance of single case studies in our archive, we are starting to witness a noteworthy trend—the increasing involvement of museum professionals as guest editors for special issues, and researchers taking on field wide questions with representative data. We see more of these trends reflected in the special issues published in the last few years, whether on materials like ivory or phenomena like sound. These scholarly efforts provide critical insights that challenge the museum movement to reconsider the societal service it provides. The current issue builds on this practice by presenting one of the critical concerns of our current era: How museums can use their power to rectify the field's collusion in suppressing peoples and culture.

This period in the museum industry signifies a crucial moment in redefining practices. The MoHoA movement challenges equity and dominance hierarchies, steering away from Eurocentric orthodoxy. This shift suggests the current museum definition will require an update soon. Situated under the theme of the Anthropocene, this work acknowledges the existential crises museums face related to material culture and human expansion.

Guest editors Dr. Edward Denison and Editorial Board Member Dr. Shahid Vawda led this issue on behalf of a global network working to decolonize modern history in the museum sector. Their commitment represents a pivotal moment in the museum movement, emphasizing critical thinking as a foundation for challenging conventions.

We first published the draft version of The Cape Town Document in July 2022. In this issue, we publish the most recent consensus version of The Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage as an open access public document. It is a watershed manifesto that calls on museum and heritage professionals to reshape what we know as cultural memory, advocating for a shift in positionality and acknowledging pluralities and intersectional issues. This document, as a community product, also exemplifies the best of what can be achieved with open peer-review. It took some with with our publishers to align to how journal articles are accepted because this document was subject to open peer-review for 18 months. It does not have a “first author” nor does it have an institution attached to it as a holder of copyright. Rather, it is the work of a community of practice that works without demand for hierarchy and ownership. In publishing this the final result, our team at Wiley has worked through these issues of intellectual property and ownership as something that can bend as we work to respond to principles of equity in publishing.

Collaborating with Drs. Denison and Vawda on this issue and our past issue allowed me to witness the best in critical thinking. Their tireless work at rectifying past wrongs has been a highlight in the many things I do as editor for this journal. I also believe that this issue provides a roadmap for the museum journal sector to further support the next generation with an eye toward reparations. Many of the authors in this issue propose a new and more practical relationship to history and planet, emphasizing the debt owed to cultures plundered and people whose names were buried by a monocular view of western European orthodoxy and individuality as the norm for understanding heritage. The Cape Town Document calls on museum professionals to rise above these past biases and serves as a community-wide call to action. It asks museum workers to become cultural healers, dedicating their time, effort, and scholarly skill to remediating our patchwork of records.

Editors and peer-reviewers shape stronger voices and open gates for new ideas. As my successor search begins at Wiley, I encourage finding someone well-versed in emerging challenges, willing to hold space for rewriting history. This sixty-seventh-year journal represents a flourishing international debate on museums' future potential. I am confident Wiley will identify the right person to assist these new critical voices.