Networks

Dialogue

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Unified Network Museum

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Little Earths

MUXXEUM

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Global Dialogue Museum

More-Than-Human Worlds

Activism

Climate Justice

Future Commons: From individuality to symbiosis

Ecologies

Jamtli Living University (JLU) - combining knowledge from the past and present to shape a modern sustainable lifestyle

Temporality

2100: 80 years of retrospective post COVID-19

Museum for Natural Science and Culture 

New Way Cafe

[Re]generator

Community

What if people gathered their own collections and information to support dialogue and climate action?

Article

Our work on Reimagining Museums for Climate Action has been significantly informed by prior research and collaborations undertaken as part of the AHRC-funded Heritage Futures research programme. 

The Heritage Futures research programme set out to explore how heritage practices, broadly defined, contribute to the making of future worlds. From 2015 to 2019, an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers (led by Principal Investigator Rodney Harrison) collaborated with 25 international partner organisations and many others to investigate heritage and heritage-like practices in a broad range of fields and contexts, and to explore the potential for innovation and creative exchange within and across them.  

The research programme aimed to: 

• Document and analyse practices by which pasts, presents and futures are assembled across a range of different heritage and heritage-like domains, by exploring them through mixed ethnographic and creative visual methods, in comparative perspective; 

• Draw on this empirical research to understand and theorise the values that are generated by the work that is undertaken in caring for futures, within each of these heterogeneous domains; and 

• Explore, in partnership with its project partners, how those different practices of assembling and caring for the future might be creatively redeployed to generate innovation, foster resilience and encourage sustainability.

Henry McGhie and Rodney Harrison co-curated a major exhibition hosted by the Manchester Museum which was inspired by the Heritage Futures research programme. The exhibition was developed over the period 2017–18 with inputs from other members of the research programme and museum staff and hosted by the museum from December 2018 until the museum closed due to COVID lockdown restrictions in March 2020. 



Heritage Futures was succeeded by the follow-on project Landscape Futures and the Challenge of Change: Towards Integrated Cultural/Natural Heritage Decision Making, funded under the AHRC Landscape Decisions/Changing Landscapes Follow-on Fund for Impact and Engagement Call. This project was  awarded to a project team which included Principal Investigator Caitlin DeSilvey (University of Exeter); Co-Investigators Rodney Harrison (University College London), Hannah Fluck (Historic England), Rosie Hails (The National Trust), Ingrid Samuel (The National Trust), and the organisation Natural England as project partner. 

The final publication from the Heritage Futures research programme is available for free in open access from UCL Press at the link below. Further information is available on the Heritage Futures website.



Harrison, R., DeSilvey, C., Holtorf, C., Macdonald, S., Bartolini, N., Breithoff, E., Fredheim, H., Lyons, A., May, S., Morgan, J. and Penrose, S. 2020. Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices . London: UCL Press.



Heritage Futures

Human rights can form the basis for transparent, effective and transformative public service.

This Guide explores how human rights are related to museums, and explores particular rights especially relevant to museums. These include many rights that relate to climate change, including the right to take part in environmental decision making, from the Aarhus Convention. The Guide can be accessed here.



Whether they realize it or not, museums, and indeed every individual who works in and with them, have duties to fulfil regarding human rights. In fact, every individual in society has duties to uphold the rights of others, just as they should expect to be able to attain their own rights.

If people are to exercise their rights and responsibilities, they need to know about them, care about them, understand how they relate to their lives and work, and to have effective, transparent institutions that fulfil their responsibilities and obligations.
However, for the most part, human rights are not even talked about in museums or in society. Few museums incorporate human rights perspectives into their planning or across their areas of activity, and the basis of museums’ decisions – their visions, missions, programming decisions and management – is often untransparent.


This Guide aims to support museums and museum workers to understand and fulfil their human rights duties with greater confidence, to use human rights as a basis for more effective public service, and to enable more people – whether as individuals, groups or communities – to be able to exercise their basic rights and freedoms through museums. It is not intended to be the last word on the subject, but to be a tool for empowerment.

Museums and Human Rights: using human rights as a basis of public service

Tagged ‘Dialogue’

(2 Research Items)

Heritage Futures

Museums and Human Rights: using human rights as a basis of public service

(1 Exhibit)

What if people gathered their own collections and information to support dialogue and climate action?

(10 Concepts)