“Reparative Museology and Its Limits” with Colin Sterling

Show notes: In this episode speak with Colin Sterling about his article, “Reparative Museology and Its Limits.” We discuss the broader political, philosophical, and cultural questions surrounding museums, memory, and institutional critique. Drawing from critical heritage studies, museum studies, psychoanalysis, and environmental humanities, we discuss the growing “reparative turn” within museums and cultural institutions, particularly as they attempt to respond to histories of colonialism, extraction, displacement, and social violence.Throughout the conversation, we unpack the distinction between museology and the museum, asking whether the practices of storytelling, collecting, archiving, and communal memory-making necessarily require the modern museum institution at all. We explore how museums increasingly position themselves as moral and reparative actors while simultaneously remaining entangled within the political and economic structures that produced many of the harms they now seek to address.We also discuss projects such as Strike MoMA, reparative abolition, restitution, alternative and mobile museum forms, and artistic interventions that challenge the authority and legitimacy of hegemonic museum structures. Along the way, we reflect on psychoanalytic theories of repair, the politics of institutional reform, and the possibilities of imagining new cultural forms beyond the limits of the neoliberal museum.Biography: Colin Sterling is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and educator working at the intersection of critical heritage studies, museum studies, artistic research, and the environmental humanities. He is Assistant Professor of Heritage, Museums and the Environment at University of Amsterdam and previously served as a postdoctoral researcher and UKRI Early Career Leadership Fellow at University College London. Sterling earned his MA and PhD from the UCL Institute of Archaeology and his BA from The University of Manchester. His research focuses on critical and creative approaches to heritage, memory, and museums.Links: https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/43/4%20(165)/33/406077/Reparative-Museology-and-Its-Limits?redirectedFrom=fulltext