Rethinking Museum Geographies: Towards Restitution and a Relational Ethics of Care in Legacies of Colonialism

Abstract

This article identifies how a critical exploration of museums and restitution processes illuminates geographical thinking on relational ethics and care. In legacies of colonialism, critical approaches to museums and restorative action show a need to address colonial violence and dispossession from stolen cultural heritage. Restorative action reveals emergent, and more hopeful, practices of care across relational geographies. Research on relational ethics, Indigenous and postcolonial spatial approaches, and geographies of care expands frameworks of understanding in critical museum geographies. It advances that a relational ethics through restitution processes can foster translocal and transnational circuits of learning and exchange, in more care-full museum geographies.