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.
It is increasingly apparent that all things are interconnected, and human agency is just one among many others in complex and often unruly processes. Such circumstances require a rethinking of the new museology, curatorial practices, and the anthropocentric conception of strong human agency foundational to museum epistemologies.
In this presentation and drawing on her monographs, Museums and the posthumanities: Curating for planetary habitability and The future of digital data, heritage and curation in a more-than human world (Routledge 2023, 2021), Prof Cameron refigures the new museology and curatorial practices as more-than-human, as ecological, embedded, enmeshed, and embodied. Using the example of former President Donald Trump’s tweets that incited the storming of the Capitol on January 6th 2021, she extends the notion of the curatorial beyond the human and machine to embrace the agential and more-than and non-human worlds previously rendered invisible or lacking agency as eco-curating processes of planetary depth and extent. Drawing on the Boulton and Watt steam engine in the Science Museum London collection and its embodied register of carbon emissions, she highlights ways of thinking and acting through more-than-human curatorial interpretative practices that has the potential to engender recuperative measures attentive to earth others, and how such figurations can attune audiences to the reality of material entanglement and accountability, and the more-than-human futures on which we our future prospects depend.
Fiona R Cameron is Associate Professor, Principal Research Fellow, Contemporary Museologies at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia and visiting scholar, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy, and visiting professor, the Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany and Linkӧping University, Sweden. Fiona is a pioneering figure in digital heritage philosophy, museums’ engagement with social and political issues and climate action, and the posthumanities taking critical museology in new directions. She has 8 Australian Research Council grants, was an investigator on 11 international grants with 6 European universities, 62 European, American, Australasian/Pacific museums and peak bodies advancing climate policy. Fiona has 101 publications including 7 books with leading publishers, MIT Press, Duke UP, and Routledge on these topics.
