ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the paradigmatic shift that has occurred within the museum field in the wake of larger, global transformations that have shaped contemporary geo-politics over the last 50 years. Calls for decolonization, historical and social justice, and the commensurate rise of a rights regime have challenged the world’s ‘moral imagination’ to borrow the term from historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn, and to this, museums – as society’s memory keepers – have not been immune. Through their association with a growing global rights movement, many museums around the world have transcended a traditional didactic logic and identified new fundamental objectives and aims. With specific reference to how the museum sector is engaging with climate change and environmental protection through multidisciplinary and social justice frameworks, this chapter considers how museums, as cultural and social institutions committed to preserving human creation and the biodiversity of our natural world, are addressing the most urgent issue in the history of humanity, while questioning to what extent a range of museological initiatives can be considered new modes of political action in the public sphere.
