Risk society, controversial topics and museum interventions : (re)reading controversy and the museum through a risk optic

This chapter offers a new reading of the museum and controversy using Ulrich Beck’s (1999) notion of global risk society, the rise of global risks and hazards such as climate change and terrorism and the emergence of new social forms drawing on the findings of the Contested Sitesresearch. Although it is clear that museums have a very important role to play in conversations, debates and decisions around topics of societal importance, Cameron argues that previous institutional forms are based on the notion of earlier risk management regimes based on discipline and risk control that inhibit such conversations and debates. In reading the museum in the context of what Beck calls second modernity, ways of engaging controversy emerge pointing to new strategies in which institutions must engage controversy as interfaces between museums and public culture become more intimately interconnected in a networked, globalising world.