Activist Pedagogies in Museum Studies and Practice: A Critical Reflection

What constitutes activism? It is a slippery term, containing an inherent subjectivity. In exploring activist pedagogies, as we approach them alongside our fellow authors in this Special Issue, we outline our perspective on activism and its link to museum education and practice. Museums have always been sites of political conflict. However, the recent turn toward activism is a newer aspect of their professional practice. Challenging the myth of neutrality in these spaces, practitioners and staff at all levels, as well as those teaching museums, galleries and heritage studies at the university level, have in recent years, begun to build activist perspectives and practices into their programs in order to advocate for global social justice and change. This Special Issue is designed to capture this shift toward a more activist practice amongst practitioners and academics who engage with museums. Born out of a seminar series, Museums, Galleries and Heritage (Studies) from the Edges, which was organized at Newcastle University (UK) between 2019 and 2020, this Special Issue, like the seminar series, is focused on bringing together voices at the foreground of activist teaching and practice from across the museum sector and higher education. Whilst our own background as editors of this Special Issue is primarily an academic one, our experience of running the seminar series at Newcastle University – in which sessions on class, decolonization, (dis)ability, queerness and race were jointly led by academics and practitioners from the cultural sector in the UK – convinced us of the need to increase the opportunities for dialogue between those academics and practitioners who are in pursuit of activist aims. In many ways, a written journal is not the most natural medium for these dialogues; however, we hope this Special Issue will provide a useful starting point for those looking to insert some of these ideas and conversations into their own practices. The value of academic-practitioner collaborations both to educational and activist work in museums has already been discussed, both within this journal and elsewhere. However, this Special Issue represents the first time that such conversations have been united through the specific consideration of shared activist pedagogies across these sectors. We find it important to think about the range of pedagogies involved when we intertwine discussions between higher education and museum sites. It is helpful to think about the process, as Loutzenheiser describes, of how knowledge is transferred from professors, museum practitioners and possible activists who train incoming