Museums in a changing world

Today, museums must respond quickly to global crises, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. These institutions also face new kinds of questions about citizenship and identity. Museums generalise and popularise information for the public, and in doing so, they can inadvertently push different groups, stories or objects of collection into the margins. This book, Marginaaleista museoihin (From margins to museums), discusses the responsibility of museum work. The aim of the publication is to look at the changes and challenges in both the museum field and museum work. It also discusses the connection between museums and academic research. The authors of the book are researchers and museum workers. Their anthology comprises 18 articles, consisting of longer research articles as well as shorter review pieces. The book contains three parts, beginning with theoretical and methodological chapters. The first part of the book, ‘Time and change in museums’ (Aika ja museoiden muutos), includes six articles. In the first chapter, Anna Rastas, Leila Koivunen and Kalle Kallio write about the development of museums. They define the concepts of marginalisation and marginalised groups and discuss important questions related to marginality. Whose histories are saved and told in museums? Whose stories, experiences and perspectives are left out? How can missing perspectives be made more visible? Even though museums collaborate with marginalised groups, such projects do not necessarily change the permanent practices of museums. As the authors tell it, the marginal themes promoted in museum exhibitions may not be of interest to many museum visitors. This presents a challenge because one of the key goals of museums is to increase the number of visitors. The strength of the article is that it clearly defines marginalisation. It is also important to write about the practical problems of museums, though. The writers do not offer direct solutions, but their observations do make readers think. Olga Davydova-Minguet, tenure-track researcher at the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland, writes about an extremely timely topic. In her article, she describes how Finns have reacted to the Russian-speaking