Colonial Legacies & Post-Colonial Challenges - Critical Museum Studies

For a long time, museum collections served the construction and legitimization of scientific disciplines such as anthropology, but also medicine, biology or history, without their constitution being really questioned. From the 1980s and 1990s, the emerging perspectives of the “New Museology” began to question collecting practices themselves. These questions necessarily led to others concerning the construction of scientific knowledge and collective memory. The practice of scientific collection (notably in the framework of ethnographic fieldwork in a “colonial situation”) and its political role began to be questioned.

The practice of selection of narratives operated by the exhibition became an object of study, as well as the conservation practices at work in museums and that began to be analyzed through the prism of the relationships between power and knowledge. Finally, the nature of the relationship built by museum mediators and art educators between museum audiences and objects appeared in turn as structured by hidden hierarchies and entangled in power relations.

This Summer School will thus focus on the highly political role of heritage collections in the construction of so-called “legitimate” knowledge and collective memory, as well as on the ways in which the constitution and use of these collections are questioned today.

Over the course of a 4-day program, students will become familiar with these issues, which will be the subject of group work. Their reflections will be encouraged through meetings organized with several museum and mediation professionals of the city of Marseille, as well as researchers specializing in critical museology. 

Main topics addressed

• Critical Museum & Heritage Studies
• Post-colonial Studies
• Colonial past & Museum collections
• Social & political role of the Museum
• Audience engagement

Learning outcomes

• Become familiar with current issues in museum studies
• Learn about objects polysemy & how to do the mediation of museum collections
• Learn about how to conceptualize an exhibition
• Learn about how to engage visitors
• Collaborate with other students on a project