The post-normal museum: Cultivating responsibility, empathy and creativity

Alex Burchmore

The modern public museum, established in part to uphold allegedly universal norms of culture and conduct, has frequently proven ill-equipped in times of crisis when normative models no longer hold. In The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience (2022), historian Samuel J. Redman observes that these moments force museums to question their essential purpose. Although ‘not always … dealt with effectively or understood accurately’, crisis nevertheless tends to ferment ‘forward-thinking, collaborative or creative solutions [for] helping us rethink museums’.¹ The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 brought one such moment, forcing museums across the world to close their doors and reconsider their public role. When most of these institutions reopened in 2021, however, the ambition to ‘build back better’ that animated the first year of the pandemic appeared to retreat before a hunger for ‘business as usual’. The daily routine of acquiring, cataloguing, conserving and curating resumed as public programs were set back in motion, even while the complexity, chaos and contradictions of the world beyond museum walls heralded a transition to ‘post-normal times’.

Drawing from the frameworks for understanding such times proposed by Ziauddin Sardar, Jerome R. Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz, this article reflects on the idea of the museum that we have inherited and the potential transformation of this idea in times of crisis. The pandemic is not the primary focus; instead, it is recognised as a circuit-breaking catalyst—along with climate catastrophe, geopolitical conflict and economic collapse—of post-normal times. The third and final section of the article offers a set of ethical principles that may prove useful as we collectively navigate present uncertainties. These are intended neither to prescribe a new normative standard nor to propose a coherent definition with illustrative case studies of the ‘post-normal museum’. Rather, it is hoped the ideals of responsibility, empathy and creativity here endorsed can furnish some inspiration for those who seek to ignite the transformative potential of our current moment.

The anxieties and doubts provoked by the first year of the pandemic for museums across the world amply demonstrate the potentially radical effects of crisis that Redman traces in the historical development of the museum as a public institution. In March 2020, Joanna Cobley brought together a series of reflections written by museum workers and scholars for a special section of Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, a sequel to the focus on natural disasters in the previous issue of the journal. Contributors to both editions were united, Cobley wrote, by their commitment to ‘resilience in action’ and their ‘desire to use [a] sudden catastrophic event to co-create new museums of the future’.² Writing in May for the American Alliance of Museums blog, in a series dedicated to ‘Museums and Equity in Times of Crisis’, Erica Lehrer and Shelley Ruth Butler affirmed a comparable commitment to ‘radical rethinking’ and urged colleagues across the sector ‘to view the current “state of exception” not only as a constraint … but as a moment to experiment’.³ Elizabeth Crooke, introducing a special issue of Museum & Society in November of the same year, likewise framed ‘this time of unprecedented change … as an opportunity for innovation’. She encouraged readers not to neglect the provocations of the present but rather ‘to demand even more’, to further extend the ‘sweeping change to the practicalities of … our museum purposes and desired impacts’.⁴ Severed from a familiar past and facing an uncertain future, in the first year of the pandemic the formerly unthinkable seemed possible, and the volatility of the unfolding global crisis appeared to offer a mandate for radical ambitions. Entrenched conventions would be reformed and old habits reassessed on the path to a new society founded on empathy and collective empowerment.

To a certain extent, this appetite for change renewed debates opened prior to the pandemic by the proposal of a new International Council of Museums (ICOM) definition of the museum. This institutional mandate has been a central point of reference for ICOM since its foundation in 1946, with the initial version drafted by the inaugural director, Georges Henri Rivière. Formally adopted in 1974, this definition remained relatively unchanged throughout the second half of the twentieth century and was re-endorsed in 2007.⁵ In early 2017, however, a new ICOM committee coalesced in response to growing calls for change. Committee members proposed a revised definition at an extraordinary general assembly meeting in Kyoto, Japan, in 2019. Outlining a vision of museums as ‘democratising, inclusive, and polyphonic spaces’ that should ‘work in active partnership with and for diverse communities … to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equity and planetary wellbeing’, this definition reflected the mood of the moment.⁶ For Lonnie Bunch, the current secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and the first African American to serve in this role, the proposal sounded ‘a clarion call for museums … to reimagine themselves’.⁷ Argentinian museum policymaker Américo Castilla likewise greeted the new definition as an opportunity to establish ‘a ground zero from which to weave fresh meaning’, to reassess the legacies of the past and to herald the promises of the future.⁸ In the event, however, dissatisfaction with the drafting of the text and discomfort with its socially activist content provoked a decision to postpone the debate.⁹

At the 2022 ICOM general conference in Prague, a second revised definition was confirmed that removed the more unsettling ambitions of the first and reaffirmed much of the original wording, albeit amended to include a commitment to ‘communicate ethically, professionally, and with the participation of communities’.¹⁰ This final decision seemed to signal a return to business as usual, yet the events of the previous three years had only further inflamed doubts that remained largely unresolved. Bruno Brulon Soares, then chair of the ICOM International Committee for Museology, declared in 2021 that the ‘revision of … paradigms and practices [had] become even more imperative … in a pandemic world’, and that museums ‘[could not] ignore the calls for structural change’.¹¹ Prolific museum scholar Elaine Heumann Gurian also confided with some disappointment, after the 2022 decision, that she had hoped ‘the closed-down interregnum [would bring] opportunity to reconsider first principles’, even ‘a wholesale rethinking of museums’. Yet many in the sector ‘continued to behave as if their prior methods and purposes were fine’.¹² The attempt to recreate museums as engines of cultural change and agents of social cohesion seemed to have failed.

In the larger context of our current phase of political and personal responses to the pandemic, this decision could be regarded as yet another manifestation of the fervent wish to ‘return to normal’. The widespread sickness, debilitating long-term effects and high mortality rates that constitute the most direct index of the pandemic continue to surge, alongside more insidious signs of civic and economic collapse. Governments and individuals across the world, however, seem to have lost the appetite for change that enlivened the gloom of 2020. Epidemiologist Steven Phillips has aptly summarised the prevailing mood as the endpoint of ‘an evolutionary arc … from fear to resignation to acquiescence to normalcy’, encouraging readers to ‘go about business as usual’.¹³ It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that a parallel desire has apparently overtaken the ambition for radical change in museums. Normative standards are central, after all, not only to the civic mandate but also to the day-to-day work of the contemporary museum.

For Anja Luepken, these standards are evident at every stage of object collection and display, from acquisition based on normative criteria set by a dealer or curator, through to the explicitly norm-enforcing process of classification, to the acts of selection and interpretation involved in preparing an exhibition.¹⁴ These processes are performed according to a prescriptive logic of appropriation and integration, removing objects from larger ecologies of meaning to align them within an internally coherent worldview. Additionally, as Ross Parry has explained, such alignment implies ‘more than just adoption and acceptance’. Museological norms, he argues, are localised to a specific context, deliberately constructed to uphold a certain set of values for a defined community and instrumental in their use to enforce ‘how things ought to be’.¹⁵ A genuine transformation of the museum as an institution shorn of this normative logic would therefore require deep structural change at all levels.

Such a transformation, however, could prove as momentous as that which museum scholars have identified with the birth of the public museum as a norm-enforcing institution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s genealogies of the prison, hospital and asylum as disciplinary technologies of the modern state, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill and Tony Bennett have described the museum as part of a larger effort to transform ‘the population … into a useful resource’ by regulating their conduct and ‘reshaping general norms of social behaviour’.¹⁶ Discipline, Hooper-Greenhill explains, in an institutional context can be defined as the division and control of time, space and movement through methods of ‘hierarchical observation, normalising judgment, and examination’. Disciplinary technologies, then, can be defined by their power to ‘survey, classify, and control time, space, bodies, and things’. The guiding aim of these technologies, however, is to transfer responsibility for the processes of surveillance and classification to the subjects of the institutional gaze, who would ideally become ‘their own overseers in the ongoing process of normalisation’.¹⁷ In the prison, hospital and asylum, this is clear in the isolation and rehabilitation of inmates and patients. In the museum, on the other hand, normalisation arises through more subtle methods.

The most subtle yet most enduring of these methods arises from the validation of the objects acquired, classified and exhibited by the museum as emblems of varying standards of civility and civilisation, to the highest of which visitors are tacitly expected to aspire. These standards are presented as self-evident and universal yet, as Carol Duncan has decisively shown, like all norms they are localised, constructed and instrumental expressions of a ‘politically organised and socially institutionalised power [aspiring] to appear … beautiful, natural, and legitimate’. Normative authority thereby reserves the right to define ‘a community and its highest values and truths [as well as] the relative standing of individuals within that community’.¹⁸ In the museum, even today, the norms on which visitors are expected to model their attitudes and behaviour are those of the ideal bourgeois citizen: a regard for reason and order, a respect for tradition, a tolerance of diversity within certain limits and an acquiescence in institutional authority. Within this space of ‘supervised conformity’, in Bennett’s phrasing, ‘the rough and raucous [must] civilise themselves’ according to ‘middle-class codes of behaviour’ and must learn to view themselves ‘as beings in incessant need of progressive development’. The core function of the museum as disciplinary technology is therefore to enforce a ‘norm of humanity—white, bourgeois, and male’—as the ideal to which we all must aspire as self-regulating, self-reforming citizens of the modern state.¹⁹

Yet can the museum remain a norm-enforcing institution in circumstances that are far from normal? In a pair of reflections on the early stages of the pandemic written in April and May 2020, museum consultant Daniel Spock compared the disruptive shock of that moment to the phenomenon of punctuated equilibrium first observed by palaeontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in the 1970s. In brief, this theory challenges the assumption that evolution follows a consistent course by drawing attention to abrupt and unexpected deviations in the fossil record that ‘punctuate’ a tendency towards stasis and generally herald rapid change. The pandemic, Spock contended, could prove to be a comparably disruptive punctuation point in the previously gradual evolution of the museum, ‘revealing the vulnerabilities in the systems that have appeared to maintain continuity’.²⁰ The first reaction among many in the sector, he predicted, would be ‘to claw our way back to where we were as quickly as possible, to try to … regain the “normal” [as] a place of familiarity, safety, and relative comfort’. Yet this impulse, Spock argues, ‘[assumes] the old normal is worth recreating’. Against this habit, he proposed that we should instead seek to excavate, examine and reassess ‘the baseline values … guiding beliefs, commitments, and assumptions we hold to be essential’, taking this as a chance ‘to reflect on what is really important’.²¹ Recalling the desire for radical change that characterised 2020, I would like to renew Spock’s call for a review of institutional legacies and to propose a new set of principles for the museum better suited to ‘post-normal times’.

The post-normal

Welcome to postnormal times. It’s a time when little out there can be trusted or gives us confidence … old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense.²²

These opening lines from Ziauddin Sardar’s landmark essay ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’, written in the wake of the global financial crisis, are eerily prescient. ‘In the normal scheme of things’, Sardar writes, ‘when things go wrong … we know what to do’, trusting ‘science and medicine [to come] to our rescue’ and accepted orthodoxies to ‘guide us towards a potential solution [as we] ride the tiger of change’.²³ The increasingly catastrophic events that marked the opening decades of our current century, however, have shaken this faith. A rise in political fundamentalism and nuclear proliferation have fractured the global geopolitical landscape, financial systems seem unable to break a cycle of inflation and recession, communities across the world are beset by the twin perils of flood and drought as climate change passes the point of crisis, while the COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc on our bodies and societies. ‘It is not just that things are going wrong’, but that:

they are going wrong spectacularly, on a global scale, and in multiple and concurrent ways. We thus find ourselves in a situation … far from normal [and] have entered the domain of the postnormal.²⁴

Sardar identifies three forces at work in the unfolding of this domain: complexity, chaos and contradiction. He attributes the first, complexity, to the interconnections that define our shared global contemporary, in which ‘nothing exists or happens in isolation [and] things change rapidly and often happen simultaneously’.²⁵ Sardar draws heavily here on the insights provided by complexity theory, one of three methodological perspectives (with chaos theory and catastrophe theory) recognised as a core line of thought within the larger interdisciplinary field of systems theory. Gurian, too, has found value in the ‘non-linear, non-hierarchical, fluid, porous, and ever-changing’ patterns studied by complexity theorists as a clarification of ‘those elements of real life that [do not fit] into the current scientific method’.²⁶ Many of the latter draw a further distinction between ordinary and emergent complexity. The first describes the complexity sustained by a system of interconnected elements in which mutually beneficial competition and cooperation prevail. A healthy ecosystem, for example, can be defined by the complex yet stable equilibrium that arises when diverse forms of life alternately compete and cooperate within a shared environment. Emergent complexity, on the other hand, arises when one of these elements asserts dominance over others, which are then either destroyed or forced to exist at the margins of their shared system. Diversity gives way to fragmentation and the system becomes perilously unstable, vulnerable to destruction by external forces or, more likely, self-destruction.²⁷ In post-normal times, emergent complexity takes precedence.

Chaos, the second force that Sardar identifies with the formation of the post-normal, arises as a natural consequence of complexity. Once again, he notes interconnection as a determining factor: individuals and institutions across the world are so inextricably intertwined, Sardar argues, that even a minor crisis at any point within this dispersed network can create a rippling shockwave of unpredictable consequences that could destroy the entire system. This risk is intensified by the accelerating pace of contemporary life, escalating the potential ‘for things to multiply rapidly and dangerously in geometric progression’ beyond our ability to control or contain.²⁸ Complexity and chaos, in turn, inevitably generate contradiction, the third force motivating the rise of the post-normal. Sardar identifies two primary forms of contradiction as especially significant: change, whereby ‘exponential acceleration has now become the norm’, yet persistent disparities in the distribution of wealth and resources remain the same; and knowledge, whereby the access we enjoy to a diverse range of information seems only to have intensified our ignorance.²⁹ Contradiction is a key concept for scholars of complexity, offering ‘a way of looking at the world [that] encompasses … change and conflict as natural and essential’. As such, like complexity itself, it can be divided into various patterns: complementarity, in which ‘opposed elements are kept in dynamic balance’; conflict, in which ‘struggle … results in the collapse of the system’; and creative tension, in which ‘resolution is achieved by the qualitative transformation of the system’.³⁰ With the ordinary equilibrium of diverse elements fragmented, conflict takes precedence in an emergent complex system from which creative tension offers the only hope of escape.

Writing respectively from an epidemiological and museological perspective, both Phillips and Spock cite the work of philosopher scientist Thomas Kuhn and especially his much-cited vision of the ‘paradigm shift’ as a touchstone for our current predicament. Phillips contends that the ‘“follow the science” mantra’ of normal times ‘has [now] become as contentious as the tenets of any other belief system’, arguing that ‘our current environment [demands] a new narrative that [will help] us to live with uncertainty’.³¹ Spock, focusing specifically on the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector, observed in April 2020 that ‘the established museum paradigm … had reached a point of instability [and] had begun to frustrate the forward movement of the field’, remarking that the pandemic had created ‘a domain … ripe for a paradigm shift’.³² Sardar’s post-normal times, however, imply more than a transition from one system of knowledge to another. Rather than Kuhn, he draws inspiration from Jerome R. Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz, philosopher scientists of equal renown who first coined the term ‘post-normal’ in a series of articles published in the 1990s. In his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Ravetz and Funtowicz explain, Kuhn assumes the continuity of a normative approach typified by ‘the unexciting [and] routine puzzle-solving by which science advances … between its conceptual revolutions’, moving from one theory to the next while procedural norms remain unchanged. ‘In this “normal” state of science’, they continue, ‘uncertainties are managed automatically, values are unspoken, and foundational problems unheard of’.³³ Post-normal science, on the other hand, acknowledges the need for a transformation at the level of practice as well as ideas.

Ravetz and Funtowicz first outlined their vision of post-normal science as a response to the more complex calculus of risk that scientists must undertake when required to inform political decisions about the threat of climate catastrophe. Such decisions, they observe, ‘are universal in scale and long-term in their impact’ yet ‘data on their effects … are radically inadequate’, while the aberrant phenomena to which scientists must respond are ‘novel, complex, and variable’, creating a situation in which ‘well-founded theories based on experiments’ become unsustainable. Further compounding this complexity, scientists must now come to terms with their own part in the creation of these problems as heirs to a tradition that, ‘after centuries of triumph and optimism, [has been] called on to remedy the pathologies of the global industrial system of which it forms the basis’.³⁴ This confession of complicity must also be accompanied by a recognition that disciplinary norms will need to change. Nature can no longer be reduced to the straightforward logic of a mathematical model, isolated in the controlled environment of the laboratory or integrated within a normative disciplinary framework, if it ever could. The ‘arrogant hegemonism’ and ‘esoteric specialism’ of the analytic sciences cannot be sustained in circumstances that demand ‘a systemic, synthetic, and humanistic approach’.³⁵ Scientists must recognise the limits of their knowledge and the legitimacy of other schools of thought, cede control and accept that the outcomes of their actions cannot be entirely predicted.

It is above all in this emphasis on the parallel challenges of ignorance and uncertainty that the models of post-normal science and post-normal times most closely intersect. In circumstances defined by complexity, chaos and contradiction, Sardar writes, ‘uncertainty may be the only thing of which we can be sure’ as our entanglement in global networks of communication and consumption combines with the unpredictability and accelerating pace of events to create a situation in which ‘old-fashioned predictions … have no value in [the face] of rapid, abrupt, and unknown change’. To navigate this uncertainty, we must contend with ‘a triple whammy of ignorance’: our lack of knowledge about cultures and disciplines other than our own; our inability to predict the risks and outcomes attendant on our actions, or what Sardar refers to as ‘known unknowns’; and our inability or unwillingness to conceive otherwise, or to engage with what Sardar evocatively terms the ‘unthought’.³⁶ Ravetz and Funtowicz outline a similar tripartite division of uncertainty, distinguishing between ‘the technical, methodological, and epistemological’ aspects of scientific practice, respectively beset by ‘inexactness, unreliability, and [the] “border with ignorance”’. While technical uncertainty can be managed by enforcing standardised (or normative) processes, and methodological uncertainty can be addressed by deferring to accepted disciplinary expertise, epistemological uncertainty undermines science itself as a framework for understanding the world and so cannot be so easily mediated.³⁷ It is at this point that a post-normal perspective becomes necessary, founded on a questioning of inherited wisdom, an embrace of diversity and a rigorous commitment to ethical principles.

The post-normal museum

How do we cope with postnormal times … How do we move forward without falling prey to chaos? … The answers to these, and a plethora of other questions [begin] with awareness and end with creativity and imagination.³⁸

A post-normal definition of the museum, like Funtowicz and Ravetz’s post-normal science and Sardar’s post-normal times, may perhaps provide a strategy to cope with present uncertainty while preparing for a more secure future. Sardar explains that he chose the term ‘post-normal’ to describe his philosophical viewpoint at least partially to avoid the millenarian tone of other forward-looking frameworks. Rather than a final cataclysm, the post-normal implies a moment of transition during which we can collectively take stock of past mistakes and work to cultivate a ‘more globally, and ecologically relevant, more pluralistic, more humane, and more peaceful [future]’.³⁹ Post-normal science, too, as theorised by Funtowicz and Ravetz, does not seek to replace but to extend and enhance current disciplinary methods. The vision of a post-normal museum outlined in this final section, then, is not intended to herald a new normative model. The aim instead is to suggest a set of principles that may serve as a theoretical basis for seizing and then holding onto the opportunity to enact meaningful change. Swedish curator and activist Klas Grinell has argued that the field of museum studies could benefit from a greater emphasis on the ‘meta-perspective’ offered by such theoretical reflection. To understand professional practice, he contends, we must shed the emphasis on case study analysis that dominates the field and strive instead ‘to be clear about the … concepts used to theorise museums’.⁴⁰ Grinell has likewise cited Sardar’s vision of the post-normal as an important ‘attempt to formulate a new social scientific and … ethical paradigm’, and therefore as a useful ground from which to attempt this reflection.⁴¹

Grinell’s use of the term ‘ethical’ is notable here. Discussions of ethics in the museum sector, perhaps due to the preference for case study analysis, generally embody either a prescriptive or reformative intent, tending in each case to reinforce predefined norms. The ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums best exemplifies the former, prescribing ‘minimum standards for museum conduct’ as well as ‘bonds of service [and] common strategic aims’.⁴² Work on this document proceeded through the later decades of the twentieth century in parallel with the drafting of a museum definition. The current code, approved in 2004, is a revision of normative standards established by the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics (1986), which drew in turn on the actions of a working group formed in 1974 and committee appointed in 1981.⁴³ A reformative ethics, on the other hand, can be noted in the work of museum professionals like Maura Reilly, whose Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (2018) aims ‘to throw inequities into high relief, laying bare the powerful ideological mechanisms’ that sustain recalcitrant biases in the sector. Reilly defines an ethical curator as one who seeks ‘to counter … under-representation, silencing, and erasure [by] challenging hierarchies and assumptions, initiating debate, and circulating new knowledge’.⁴⁴ Such reformative aims, however, while much needed, can risk prioritising what Bennett has identified as the normative goal of ‘representational adequacy’ over deep structural transformation.⁴⁵ As Reilly herself cautions, while it is vital to expand the canon and champion those who have previously been marginalised or stereotyped, reforms such as these can tend to assume or even solidify prevailing norms.⁴⁶ The ethical principles outlined below, attentive to the counsel offered by Grinell and Reilly, are neither reformative nor prescriptive but rather theoretical or speculative in intent.

Humility, modesty and responsibility

For Sardar, humility, modesty and responsibility are both the primary lessons that the complexity, chaos and contradictions of post-normal times compel us to learn and the ‘indispensable virtues’ that we must cultivate to find our way beyond uncertainty. First, he argues, we must acknowledge the limits of our ability to control events that are inextricably interconnected and so inherently complex: we must be humble in our claims to power, which can only ever be conditional and short term. We must also recognise our limited understanding of these events, beset not only by complexity but also by contradiction. Finally, and most importantly, we must accept the part we have played in the arising of these events and the part we will play in their continued unfolding: we must assume responsibility for the consequences of our actions, even the most seemingly insignificant of which can trigger a chain of cause and effect that ends in disaster.⁴⁷ On an individual level, then, our shared adherence to abstract norms of belief and behaviour can no longer generate confidence or comfort in these post-normal times. Instead, solace can perhaps be found in the practice of humility, modesty and responsibility as ethical guides on the path to a mutually beneficial coexistence.

Gurian, in her discussion of the relevance of complexity theory for museological practice, has proposed that museums can cultivate the same virtues. Above all, in their presentation of the memories and narratives through which we make sense of the world, museums could ‘move away from assertive simplicity’ to instead demonstrate ‘that problems are complicated, their solutions intertwined, estimated, and cumulative’. Museums can encourage visitors to expect ‘messy situations and partial solutions’ typified by ‘complexity, creativity, nonconformity, and overt conversations’, fostering awareness that ‘public problems are complex, that solutions are always approximate, and unintended consequences still seep in when least expected’. Consequently, Gurian argues, visitors will gain an opportunity to cultivate perseverance in the face of uncertainty, a will ‘to see incremental activity as useful … trial and error as essential’, and a respect for complications and differences of opinion.⁴⁸ Exhibitions, for example, rather than seeking to definitively resolve probing questions, could provoke doubts and discussion or guide visitors through a range of perspectives, including the contrary and the contradictory, that defy singular resolution. Museum staff could more explicitly acknowledge their limited knowledge and inevitable subjective bias, highlighting gaps in understanding and moments of conjecture as an invitation to broaden the conversation.

Diversity, civility and empathy

Sardar further advocates for an embrace of diversity as another strategy that individuals and institutions alike must adopt if they are to navigate through post-normal times. While humility, modesty and responsibility can provide an ethical foundation for our actions and prepare us for complexity, chaos and contradiction, we cannot face these challenges alone. Additionally, such challenges are so interconnected in cause and effect that they can neither be addressed nor resolved independently. ‘A major principle of survival in a complex environment’, Sardar notes, ‘is that the mechanism that deals with it must itself be complex … only variety can cope with variety’.⁴⁹ Individualism, in such an environment, intensifies the chaos and the primary contradictions of change and ignorance that define post-normal times. As disparities in wealth and privilege grow more pronounced, self-interest becomes ‘a recipe for catastrophe [that] empowers … those [who are already] most adept at utilising the levers of power’. To resolve these contradictions, we must aspire to ‘organise, listen, and sensibly engage everyone in a discourse of doing for mutual benefit’.⁵⁰ Sardar thereby adds an activist dimension to one of the key principles of post-normal science outlined by Ravetz and Funtowicz: the creation of an ‘extended peer community’ to assure the quality of scientific research. Normative science, as a product of the same eighteenth-century ideals that created the disciplinary technology of the norm-enforcing museum, privileges authorised expertise and has become ‘a preserve of those who can engage on a prolonged and protected course of education, and thereby of the social groups to which they belong’. Post-normal science instead invites debate between multiple perspectives, ‘not merely [as] an ethical or political act [but to] enrich the processes of scientific investigation’, generating complex resolutions for complex problems.⁵¹

These aims can be productively linked to the call for ‘democratising, inclusive, and polyphonic spaces’ in the revised museum definition proposed in 2019. In his own application of Sardar’s theoretical model, Grinell identifies the creation of such spaces as an essential museological aim. Challenging the principle of universality with which museums have long been associated—and on which the ICOM definition depends–he argues that ‘the future must be pluriversal [as] no single paradigm can understand and order the world’.⁵² Reilly, too, has noted the value of a ‘relational approach’ for activist curators, emphasising dialogue over unanimity, thematic diversity over a coherent narrative and a ‘kaleidoscopic’ rather than linear vision of history. Through this, she contends, ‘we can present multiplicity … not in a monologue of sameness, but in a multitude or cacophony of voices’, contributing to the creation of ‘a polysemic site of contradictory positions and contested practices’.⁵³ Civility can be held as a crucial watchword for this pluralistic debate, yet not according to the norms of decorum, politeness, courtesy and etiquette with which the term has historically been associated. In a post-normal context, a commitment to civility could instead signal a will to respect and, above all, empathise with diverse perspectives. In disputes of restitution, for example, conciliation and compromise may offer a more civil course of action than rigid adherence to tradition and institutionalised authority. In the same vein, museums might intervene directly in public debates that involve the communities whose memories they safeguard and communicate, abandoning a neutrality that can all too easily mask complicity in favour of an honest and provocative yet mindful and empathetic invitation to informed dialogue.

Imagination and creativity

In addition to responsibility and empathy, the most valuable principles that individuals and institutions can cultivate in post-normal times are imagination and creativity. The conditions of ‘permacrisis’ to which we seem to have consigned ourselves, trapped within a cycle of conflict and catastrophe, can to a great extent be framed as the result, following Sardar, of ‘a failure of imagination [or,] rather, subservience of imagination to orthodoxy’.⁵⁴ His words are again prophetic of our current circumstances:

Once the pain and suffering [are] over, and things appear to swing back to normalcy, the straitjacket of orthodoxy returns society to conformity … and, we are told, we can return to business as usual … This is a dangerous illusion [that] all too often means we are creating the conditions to repeat historic mistakes.⁵⁵

If we hope to escape this cycle, Sardar warns, we must guard against such complacency and ‘imagine our way out of post-normal times’. Further, seeking to create an extended peer community to assure that our ambitions are equitable and empathetic, we should ‘unleash a broad spectrum of imaginations from the rich diversity of human cultures’ as we search for ‘alternatives to … orthodox ways of being and doing’.⁵⁶ Our creativity must be collective in spirit and diverse in approach. In contrast to the ‘mythology of tortured geniuses and lightning bolts of inspiration’ that defined creativity in the modern era, Alfonso Montuori has therefore identified post-normal times with ‘[a] contextual, collaborative [and] participatory creativity’. The roles of artist or inventor and viewer or consumer can no longer be clearly differentiated, he asserts, while the products of a creative mind are not limited to masterpieces or scientific discoveries but can be humble or even quotidian. The historic authority of ‘a priestly class of artists and futurists’ cannot remain intact in a chaotic and interconnected world.⁵⁷ Museums, as guardians of the heritage of humanity in all our variety and complexity, are ideally placed to nurture the blossoming of this new creative spirit. Opened to the broadest range of visitors and animated by a dialogue of many voices, there is great potential for these disciplinary technologies of the modern era to become a stage for the performance of our most utopian imaginings in post-normal times.

In the months immediately following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, an appetite for radical change took hold across the world, including in the GLAM sector. While our movements were temporarily limited by quarantine and travel restrictions, the hope for positive change that this circuit-breaking catastrophe might bring seemed limitless. By 2021, however, as circulation of the virus showed no signs of abating, many came to yearn instead for a ‘return to normal’, providing a mandate for governments in Europe, the United States and Australia to institute a resumption of ‘business as usual’ as a matter of policy. In the GLAM sector, too, little seemed to have changed when museums and galleries reopened their doors. Yet our shared circumstances remain far from normal and could even be regarded as distinctly ‘post-normal’: defined by complexity, chaos and contradictions that leave us vulnerable to an increasingly pervasive uncertainty. Created in the modern era as disciplinary technologies for upholding social and cultural norms, museums must therefore adapt to remain relevant and responsive in our present context of catastrophe and creativity. Rather than seeking to uphold universal norms, the ‘post-normal museum’ could instead strive to model ethical principles. By cultivating a broader appreciation for collective responsibility, civil empathy and everyday creativity, the museum can become a beacon for the promise of a better future as we navigate beyond the crises of the present.

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1. 1 Samuel J. Redman, The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience (New York: New York University Press, 2022), 3–5, doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479809363.001.0001.

2. 2 Joanna Cobley, David Gaimster, Stephanie So, Ken Gorbey, Ken Arnold, Dominique Poulot, Bruno Brulon Soares, Nuala Morse, Laura Osorio Sunnucks, María de las Mercedes Martínez Milantchí, Alberto Serrano, Erica Lehrer, Shelley Ruth Butler, Nicky Levell, Anthony Shelton, Da (Linda) Kong and Mingyuan Jiang, ‘Museums in the Pandemic: A Survey of Responses on the Current Crisis’, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 8 (2020): 118, 133, 115, doi.org/10.3167/armw.2020.080109.

3. 3 Erica Lehrer and Shelley Ruth Butler, ‘Curatorial Dreaming in the Age of COVID-19’, American Alliance of Museums (blog), 4 May 2020, www.aam-us.org/2020/05/04/curatorial-dreaming-in-the-age-of-covid-19/.

4. 4 Elizabeth Crooke, ‘Communities, Change and the COVID-19 Crisis’, Museum & Society 18, no. 3 (November 2020): 305–8, doi.org/10.29311/mas.v18i3.3533.

5. 5 Bruno Brulon Soares, ‘Decolonising the Museum? Community Experiences in the Periphery of the ICOM Museum Definition’, Curator: The Museum Journal 64, no. 3 (July 2021): 442–4, doi.org/10.1111/cura.12436.

6. 6 ‘ICOM Announces the Alternative Museum Definition That Will Be Subject to a Vote’, ICOM: International Council of Museums, 25 July 2019, icom.museum/en/news/icom-announces-the-alternative-museum-definition-that-will-be-subject-to-a-vote/.

7. 7 Lonnie Bunch, in Andreas Etges and David Dean, ‘The International Council of Museums and the Controversy about a New Museum Definition’, International Public History 5, no. 1 (2022): 24, doi.org/10.1515/iph-2022-2039.

8. 8 Américo Castilla, foreword to Elaine Heumann Gurian, Centering the Museum: Writings for the Post-Covid Age (New York: Routledge, 2022), xvi.

9. 9 For a summary of the objections against the proposed new definition, see John Fraser, ‘A Discomforting Definition of Museum’, Curator: The Museum Journal 62, no. 4 (October 2019): 501–4, doi.org/10.1111/cura.12345. Readers might also be interested to study the transcript of a conversation in which the author participated at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney, on International Museum Day 2021. See Craig Barker, Helena Robinson, James L. Flexner, Anna Lawrenson and Alex Burchmore, ‘The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine (A Conversation)’, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 10 (2022): 159–69, doi.org/10.3167/armw.2022.100112.

10. 10 ‘ICOM approves a New Museum Definition’, ICOM: International Council of Museums, 24 August 2022, icom.museum/en/news/icom-approves-a-new-museum-definition/.

11. 11 Soares, ‘Decolonising the Museum’, 451.

12. 12 Gurian, ‘Introduction’, Centering the Museum, 2–3.

13. 13 Steven Phillips, ‘This is the Phase of the Pandemic Where Life Returns to Normal’, Time, 3 August 2022, time.com/6203058/covid-19-pandemic-return-to-normal-column/; Steven Phillips, ‘The New Normal for COVID Calls for a New Narrative’, Scientific American, 3 August 2022, www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-normal-for-covid-calls-for-a-new-narrative/.

14. 14 Anja Luepken, ‘Politics of Representation—Normativity in Museum Practice’, Journal of Religion in Europe 4, no. 1 (2011): 158–60, doi.org/10.1163/187489210X553548.

15. 15 Ross Parry, ‘The End of the Beginning: Normativity in the Postdigital Museum’, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1 (2013): 27–8, doi.org/10.3167/armw.2013.010103 (original emphasis).

16. 16 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 168; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (New York: Routledge, 1995), 6, doi.org/10.4324/9780203415825.

17. 17 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 168–71.

18. 18 Carol Duncan, Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995), 6, 8–9.

19. 19 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 100, 28, 46, 101–2.

20. 20 Daniel Spock, ‘A Post-Coronavirus Museum’, Wunderkammer (blog), 23 April 2020, wunderkammer.blog/2020/04/23/a-post-coronavirus-museum/.

21. 21 Daniel Spock, ‘Museums: Essential or Non-Essential?’, Wunderkammer (blog), 7 May 2020, wunderkammer.blog/2020/05/07/museums-essential-or-non-essential/.

22. 22 Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’, Futures 42 (2010): 435, doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2009.11.028.

23. 23 Ibid., 436.

24. 24 Ibid.

25. 25 Ibid., 436–7.

26. 26 Elaine Heumann Gurian, ‘The Importance of “and”: Using Complexity Theory to Counter Simple Exhibitions’, in Centering the Museum, 46–8.

27. 27 Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, ‘Emergent Complex Systems’, Futures 26, no. 6 (1994): 568–71, doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(94)90029-9.

28. 28 Sardar, ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’, 437–8.

29. 29 Ibid., 439.

30. 30 Funtowicz and Ravetz, ‘Emergent Complex Systems’, 572–3.

31. 31 Phillips, ‘The New Normal for COVID’.

32. 32 Spock, ‘A Post-Coronavirus Museum’.

33. 33 Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, ‘Science for the Post-Normal Age’, Futures 25, no. 7 (1993): 739–40, doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(93)90022-L.

34. 34 Ibid., 742, 739.

35. 35 Funtowicz and Ravetz, ‘Emergent Complex Systems’, 577; Funtowicz and Ravetz, ‘Science for the Post-Normal Age’, 739.

36. 36 Sardar, ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’, 439–41; Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Postnormal Times Revisited’, Futures 67 (2015): 28, doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2015.02.003.

37. 37 Funtowicz and Ravetz, ‘Science for the Post-Normal Age’, 743–4.

38. 38 Sardar, ‘Postnormal Times Revisited’, 37.

39. 39 Ibid., 27.

40. 40 Klas Grinell, ‘Challenging Normality: Museums in/as Public Space’, in Museums and Truth, ed. Annette B. Fromm, Per B. Rekdal and Viv Golding (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 170.

41. 41 Ibid., 171.

42. 42 Geoffrey Lewis, ‘The ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums: Background and Objectives’, in Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage, ed. Bernice L. Murphy (London: Routledge, 2016), 52.

43. 43 Ibid., 45–6.

44. 44 Maura Reilly, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018), 21, 215.

45. 45 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 90.

46. 46 Reilly, Curatorial Activism, 24–5.

47. 47 Sardar, ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’, 437–42.

48. 48 Gurian, ‘The Importance of “and”’, 43–5, 48, 51.

49. 49 Sardar, ‘Postnormal Times Revisited’, 37.

50. 50 Sardar, ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’, 438, 442–3 (emphasis added).

51. 51 Funtowicz and Ravetz, ‘Science for the Post-Normal Age’, 741, 752–3.

52. 52 Grinell, ‘Challenging Normality’, 173–4.

53. 53 Reilly, Curatorial Activism, 30–1.

54. 54 Sardar, ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’, 443. The neologism ‘permacrisis’, chosen as the 2022 Collins Word of the Year, has been defined as ‘an extended period of instability and insecurity … resulting from a series of catastrophic events’. David Shariatmadari, ‘A Year of “Permacrisis”’, Collins Language Lovers (blog), 1 November 2022, blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/a-year-of-permacrisis/.

55. 55 Sardar, ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’, 443–4.

56. 56 Ibid., 443.

57. 57 Alfonso Montuori, ‘Beyond Postnormal Times: The Future of Creativity and the Creativity of the Future’, Futures 43 (2011): 221, 225–6, doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2010.10.013.