This project brings together museum practitioners and scholars from geography, media studies, and cultural studies, to address museums and conflict.
What is missing from current cultural political debates is a conceptually nuanced engagement with the role of conflicts in museum diplomacy. While literatures on cultural diplomacy predominantly rely on hopeful and celebratory notions of consensus and bridgebuilding, leading to the restricted epistemological assumption that diplomacy can solve or fully overcome value-related differences, this research project seeks to problematize this ‘positive’ approach. Initiating a new international research collaboration between Canadian and German scholars and museum practitioners, the aim of this project is to examine museum diplomacy from a conflict-oriented perspective (including both conflicts between states or regions, and those between different actors within one political system).
Research questions include:
- How do museums deal with conflict, both within their own organizations and with regards to social and geopolitical conflicts on broader scales?
- Which policies are museums affected by?
- (How) Could museums be understood as actors of diplomacy?
- How do explicit and implicit cultural policies cultivate (or hinder) museum alliances for cultural diversity, pluralism and diplomacy?
- How do museums act to engage with value– and resource-related conflicts in respectful, sustainable and equitable ways?
Research team: Joachim Baur (TU Dortmund University), Friederike Landau-Donnelly (Humboldt University of Berlin), Sascha Priewe (Aga Khan Museum), and Sarah E.K. Smith (Western University).
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
