Museum Practices and the Posthumanities: Curating for Planetary Habitability

This book critiques modern museologies and curatorial practices that have been complicit in emerging existential crises. It confidently presents novel, more-than-human curatorial visions, methods, frameworks, policies, and museologies radically refiguring the epistemological foundations of curatorial, museological thinking, and practice for a habitable planet. Modern curatorial and museological practices are dominated by modern humanism in which capital growth, social, technological advancement, hubris, extraction, speciest logics, and colonial domination predominate, often with­out reflection. 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. Museum Practices and the Posthumanities: Curating for Planetary Habitability reveals how these practices are ill-equipped to deal with the contemporary world of rapid digital transformations, post-Covid living, climate change, and its impacts among other societal changes, and it shows how museums might best meet these challenges by thinking with and in more-than-human worlds. This book is aimed at museological scholars and museum professionals, and it will provide them with the inspiration to conduct research on and curate from a different ecological reference point to promote a world good enough for all things to thrive in radical co-existence.