Curating and museologies in more-than-human worlds

Current ways of thinking and living in the western world, and the value judgements and actions that are borne out of modern humanism, capital growth, and extraction - in which museums are complicit - are contributing to the devastating consequences of global warming and related more-than-human disasters. Such circumstances require a rethinking of the museum, curatorial practices, and the anthropocentric conception of strong agency founded on epistemological subject- object models and the mindsets that emerge from these relational figurations. 1 It is increasingly apparent that all things are interconnected, and human agency is just one among many others in complex and often unruly processes. While history, science and technology museums, and their engagement with non-human worlds, have always been ecological as an empirical reality, the human-centred frameworks and forms of human agency that institutions deploy tend to be non-cognizant of this reality. This article is a synopsis of the arguments presented in my recent monograph, Museum Practices and the Posthumanities: Curating for Planetary Habitability. This book project seeks to inspire museological scholars to conduct research and for museum professionals to curate all manner of activities from a different ecological reference point. It acknowledges that for this to occur, novel and plural more-than-human curatorial visions, methods, conceptual frameworks, policies, and museologies are required that signal an enmeshed and more-than-human approach to the make-up and composition of the world to promote a planet good enough for all things to live and thrive in radical coexistence. The book also offers theoretical grounding for museum activismin the face of climate and planetary crises while at the same time undoing the crisis of modern humanism.