Wunderkammer

Abstract: The parents of young children will often find themselves spending inordinate amounts of time in museums—art museums, children’s museums, natural history museums, living history museums. We take our children to museums to enrich their learning, of course, but if we’re being honest, we’re also simply passing time. We’re passing time in spaces deemed (generally) open to caregivers and children and conducive to wandering and thinking apart from market-driven, work-a-day time, but museums are also repositories of past time and as such may reinforce painful reminders of cultural hegemonies and ecological disasters as surely as they also show us the kaleidoscopic beauty of our world. “Wunderkammer” questions the roles museums play in our educational lives and in the educational lives of our children.