EXTENDED DEADLINE: Jan 29, 2024.

Museological Review, Issue 27: "Museums as spaces of rootedness and response-ability".

Submission deadline for abstracts/proposals: Monday, January 15, 2024.

What if we could trust the ground under our feet? Museums as spaces of rootedness and response-ability

Sometimes it seems like the sign of our times is constant instability - from the COVID health crisis to climate change, from wars erupting across the globe to the rise in far-right nationalisms, from growing economic disparity to the multiplication of racist, xenophobic and sexist discourses. As if we could no longer trust the ground we stand on; as if, at any moment, things could abruptly change in new, unpredictable ways.

The 27th issue of Museological Review looks at museums as spaces of rootedness and response-ability. It wishes to place museums (and other institutions, collectives, and organisations doing museum-like work with archives, communities and mediation of knowledges) at the centre of the question of livability in times of capitalist ruins. As many museums today are once again attending to their situated contexts and histories; we believe there is an argument to be made regarding the contemporary significance of roots and rootedness in museum practice. Thinking of roots is a reminder that no one lives everywhere and everyone lives somewhere; of the invisible rhizomatic structures that allow for communication and maintenance; of roots as forms of situated knowledges, vital to understanding and becoming-with the realities of each place.

Rooted museum work might look like short or long-term alliances, partnerships, and collaborations with museums’ neighbours and local communities; museums engaging in ecological work like orchards, gardens, or recuperation of green areas; practices where museum power (be it epistemological, aesthetic, financial or symbolic) is shared with its co-habitants. We are looking for instances where museums care, attend-to, and sustain those they share a place with, with all the messiness this collaborative work implies. These actions may be big projects involving the many, or very well be modest and small. Nonetheless, they are necessary for co-creating new futures in times of ecological and capitalist ruin, and for recomposing the frameworks needed to live together, and once again trust the ground under our feet.

Besides traditional academic papers, we are open to practitioner papers that creatively engage with the material world and museum work, and interviews, exhibition reviews, reflective papers and/or personal accounts, as well as visual submissions and short contributions.
We especially invite contributors from the Global South and systematically disenfranchised voices from around the world, encouraging submissions regarding topics that include but are not limited to

- Museums engaging in place-making and grounded practices
- Institutional initiatives for power-sharing or collaboration
- Community-oriented initiatives in museums and as museums
- Decentralised praxis in museum studies
- Commons and commoning in museums and cultural production
- (In)sustainability of institutional models and formats
- Institutions and local ecosystems: social, political and economic networks
- Collective and collaborative archiving and exhibiting
- Museological Review is accepting submissions in the following formats:
- Academic and practitioner papers (maximum 5,000 words);
- Interviews (maximum 3,000 words) with museum and cultural practitioners, collectives, artists, and researchers;
- Exhibition reviews (maximum 1,000 words) including reviews of exhibitions and propositions that move across well-established categories and structures of display and challenge Western exhibition models;
- Reflective papers or personal accounts (maximum 2,000 words) which refer to collective and participatory experiences, archival materials and records, and artistic practices and research.
- Visual submissions (maximum 5 images) which approach and depict the main topics of this issue;
- Short contributions (maximum 500 words) such as poems, manifestos, transcriptions and records of oral histories.

Submissions and enquiries should be emailed to: museologicalreviewleicester.ac.uk.