The Time Machine: challenging perceptions of time and place to enhance climate change engagement through museums

Abstract

This article proposes that applying time-related concepts in museum exhibitions and events can contribute constructively to people’s engagement with climate change. Climate change now and future presents particular challenges as it is perceived to be psychologically distant. The link between this distance and effective climate action is complex and presents an opportunity for museums, as sites where psychological distance can be explored in safe, consequence-free ways. This paper explores how museums can help people develop an understanding of their place within the rhetoric of climate change, and assist them with their personal or collective response to the climate challenge. To do so, we find that two time- and place-related concepts, Brian Eno’s the Big Here and Long Now and Foucault’s heterotopia, can provide useful framings through which museums can support constructive climate change engagement.