Pausing, Reflection, and Action: Decolonizing Museum Practices

Abstract

Museums are complex, intersectional informal learning spaces that are situated in a distinctive positionality of power, social trust, and colonialism. For many people, they serve as community spaces that empower the imagination and connect intergenerational learning, while simultaneously functioning as prestigious institutions for research and scholarship. Yet, for Black, Indigenous and Communities of Color, museums equate to pain. Museums are everlasting monuments that replicate colonial erasure and violence through their exhibitions, educational content, and through their curatorial, stewardship, and collecting practices. In thinking about these nuanced paradigms, it is essential we critically interrogate how museums can responsibly move forward while being held accountable for past and current colonial harm without being performative. My goal is to reflect on this complex dichotomy through physical and digital initiatives to underscore how museum’s anti-colonial and decolonial practices can decenter Euro-American historiography in an educational context.