Museums, Socio-Ecological Thinking, and Activist Pedagogies of Imagination

Abstract

This article explores the complex, “contact zone” nature of museums within the context of the current environmental crisis threatening our planet. Historically and even today, museums have engaged in a practice of “monocultural” thinking which is mired in a pretext to neutrality that has advanced the patriarchal capitalist neoliberal status quo and maintained a vision of a human/non-human binary of power, dominance, and control. However, there is also growing evidence that museums are shifting their approaches. Focusing on examples from Canada, we discuss how museums are using exhibitions and pedagogical and community outreach strategies to render visible deeply problematic and global “technofossil” practices, encourage activism through aesthetic engagement, encourage dialogue between community and industry as well as engage in imaginative decolonising initiatives that remap our understandings of who we are and where we need to go. We argue that in taking up environmental issues in politically intentional ways, museums create “oppositional views” that act as pedagogical sites of resistance.

Taking risks

“…With the urgent need to re-imagine, revise, re-create an alternative, more just, healthy and sustainable world, a greater number of educators are using the imagination and aestheticsthey use drama, play, artistic forms, film, experiential learning of various kinds (Spring & Clover, 2021;Butterwick & Roy, 2016). Art-making can create impulses towards an alternative future; strong rhythms, drums, singing, dance are part of any collective rituals as much as healing ceremonies performed by traditional healers, and they offer cathartic as much as aesthetic experiences.…”