New and urgent museologies in the face of the changes and challenges of the 21st century

Museums are changing. Urgent social demands, such as the environmental crisis, racial justice, recognition of Indigenous knowledge, and historical reparations, are leading museum institutions to rethink their practices and deeper purposes.

This was the starting point for the debate held on June 13th at the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy in Paris as part of the France-Brazil Museology Seminar program. The National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) organized the event in partnership with FAPESP and the University of São Paulo (USP) during FAPESP Week France 2025.

"What is a museum anyway? This is not a rhetorical question. When museology opens itself up to multidisciplinary and multicultural collaborations, it needs to be willing to understand other ways of thinking about what we call a museum. Indigenous ontologies, for example, have taught us a lot about other ways of conceiving museums, other ways of imagining the world.

"As Ailton Krenak—whose ideas have influenced my entire career—points out, the museum is a father, a mother, a relative," said Camila Wichers, a professor at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at the University of São Paulo (MAE-USP), where she coordinates the master's program in museology.

According to her, as an applied social science, museology must allow itself to be influenced by different ways of knowing and living. "In the reading I've been proposing, the museological fact listens to the relationship between people, things, and territories. And by 'things," I mean everything that exists: what's corporeal and incorporeal, human and non-human," she said.

"In Brazil, for example, there are already museums dedicated to hip-hop, as well as museum processes that are built around these cultural practices. In this context, the territory is where the rhyme battles take place, where the graffiti is painted, where the bodies of the practitioners become territory. Museology here looks at all of this," said Wichers.

"In a world undergoing rapid change, acting locally in the territories isn't only necessary, but urgent. It's also at this level that we face the great challenges—and at the same time we find strengths," she said.

"There's a museology taught in universities and another practiced in these spaces. Sometimes the two meet. Conventional museums can draw on the experiences of indigenous, peripheral, and territorial museums. And institutional museums should also be places where the public can dream and imagine other worlds—through encounters between science, art, and ancestry," said Wichers.

Joëlle Le Marec, a professor at France's National Museum of Natural History, said that the new museology should not just be a set of methods or techniques for participation. "It is, above all, a change of position: that of listening, dialoging, cohabiting, recognizing other forms of existence and knowledge. It's an invitation to epistemological humility."

"How can we museum professionals apply this concretely in museum strategies? How should museums position themselves in societies where we're seeing significant climate and environmental changes?" she said.

"Information and communication, the evolution of notions of cultural belonging and identity—these are times of new paradigms—encourage us to rethink our practice. Disseminating knowledge, educating, raising awareness, questioning, stimulating engagement are also objectives we must take on."

Le Marec also highlighted the importance of multicultural research in museums, especially in so-called peripheral institutions. These institutions are deeply rooted in their territories and communities, and are at the forefront of acquiring knowledge from an emancipatory perspective.

"The European museum field is currently experiencing a turning point, with greater openness to community experiences and approaches from the Global South, especially Brazil. There's great conceptual strength in Brazilian social museology practices. It isn't just a question of applying participatory tools, but of reconstructing, together with others, the very categories with which we think about what a museum is," she said.

Museological insurrection

"The current review of ethnology and natural history museums is part of a broader process of decolonization of institutions and museum practices that have historically been conducted without the participation of the peoples whose heritage has been appropriated," said Bruno Brulon Soares, a professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and chairman of the International Committee on Museology of the International Council of Museums.

"It returns to the fundamental principles evoked at the end of the 20th century, as well as responding to the demands of social groups who demand control over their own representation and rehumanization in museums."

"Since the international movements for a new museology and its critical appropriation by the so-called 'communities'—a term I don't intend to essentialize, although I recognize its limitations—we've seen a museological insurrection led by indigenous groups, peripheral urban populations, young people in precarious situations, Afro-descendants, LGBTQIA+ groups. These are museums that turn memory into a political act of struggle for human rights and social justice," he said.

For Soares, museums that do not recognize this movement remain on the sidelines.

"The role of museums in the development of Latin American societies includes issues such as agrarian reform, cultural rights, and the relationship between urban and rural environments—all of this in regions threatened by authoritarian governments and the expansion of global capitalism. It's important to remember that authoritarianism in our region is at the root of colonization and the semiotic and violent appropriation of ancestral lands, a process that continues to this day," he said.

He added that, when addressing environmental issues, museums must consider the ideas, concerns, and representations of their audiences and communities. Social demand forces museums to rethink their mission and redefine themselves.

"This reflexive movement leads us to a fundamental question: What do we museologists owe to the peoples that museums have historically objectified? This question leads us to understand the environment as an integrated world in which we're all involved. It's precisely the people who are excluded from museological decisions who are today alerting us to the environmental crisis. This is one of the lessons of social museology: a museum that ignores its environment doesn't fulfill its social function," he said.

Insurgent museologies

Manuelina Maria Duarte Cândido, a professor at the Federal University of Goiás and a guest lecturer in the Sociomuseology Doctorate Program at Lusophone University in Lisbon, outlined the history of museology in Latin America. She highlighted what she calls "insurgent museologies."

"In the plural, to highlight the centrality of the process of moving from the new museology to social museology. But I'm not ignoring the simultaneous existence of various other currents which, in different contexts, have also proposed new museological practices, concepts, and experiments," she said.

"In 1972, the Round Table on the Role of Museums in Latin America was held in Santiago, Chile. Unlike previous regional seminars, Spanish was adopted as the working language, and the speakers were mostly Latin American, also coming from fields such as urban planning. This interdisciplinary approach, centered on the problems of Latin America's big cities, inspired the formulation of the concept of the 'integral museum' or 'integrated museum' where different heritage strands are articulated beyond the material objects of disciplinary museums," said Duarte Cândido.

"The event in Chile also introduced the notion of the political responsibility of museum professionals and the social use of heritage. It's often repeated—almost like a legend—that Paulo Freire was invited to take part as a speaker, but the Brazilian military dictatorship prevented him from attending by sending an official representative. Even so, the echoes of Freire's thought are present in various parts of the Santiago Declaration. This is a decisive turning point for the birth of social museology, which, however, would see its implementation delayed by dictatorships and authoritarian regimes," she said.

"It's worth remembering that Freire, one of the pillars of social museology, wrote about the pedagogy of the oppressed and the pedagogy of liberation, defending a critical education aimed at reading the world and questioning it. For him, educating means dialoging—and this requires the educator to continually ask himself: for what, for whom, and against whom do I act?" said Duarte Cândido.

However, the professor recalled that the proposal to create an international thematic committee for community museums and ecomuseums was rejected at the 1983 General Conference of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in London.

In response, Pierre Mayrand led the organization of the International Workshop on Ecomuseums and New Museology in Canada the following year. This workshop resulted in a declaration outlining the fundamental principles of the ecomuseums movement.

"This is the founding document of the new museology, which takes up the ideals of Santiago: priority for social development, popular participation, and the recognition of new types of museums, sometimes without traditional collections, to which the ICOM should give legitimacy," he said.

"The new museology breaks with the pillars of the classic model—collection, building and discipline—and proposes a relationship between the community and the heritage it produces and manages in the territory where it lives. This heritage is understood broadly, integrating material and immaterial goods, landscapes and knowledge, as well as their custodians."

In the 1990s and 2000s, local and community museums proliferated in Brazil. Since 2010, similar models have spread to countries such as Italy, Japan, and Mozambique. In Brazil and Mexico, the strengthening of community museum networks has promoted social museology by encouraging the exchange of experiences and mutual support.

"Social museology radicalizes the new museology by going to the root of the struggles for social justice. It takes on a political and engaged role in disputes over memory, the right to remember, and the right to the existence of vulnerable groups. The territory here is no longer the museum building, but the lived space, the space of struggle—for housing, land, visibility. The body also becomes a territory of resistance, especially historically marginalized bodies: female, racialized, LGBTQIA+. Social museology defends the protagonism of these subjects, giving them a first-person voice," said Duarte Cândido.

"Finally, I'd like to highlight the central role of Latin America—and Brazil in particular—in the international consolidation of this area. An important milestone was the 2015 UNESCO Recommendation on the promotion and protection of museums and collections, proposed at Brazil's initiative with the support of other Latin American countries," she said.

Provided by FAPESP