Call for papers | Museums as spaces of sensitive and eco-logical knowledge

Educazione Aperta Research Community

The Museum is an institution that has been interpreting its educational function from a social and cultural perspective for a long time. It is an opportunity for those engaged in pedagogical research to experiment those projects that cross-culturally pose the methodological issues of experiencing and making knowledge within a museum context. Thus, the Museum is physical and symbolic space from which to bring out more explicitly the nexus between Art, Culture, Science, Environment, Education, Training and Health in order to see implemented and substantiated a certain theory of the novel (with Bachtin, Lukas) and an aesthetic theory (from Dewey to Merleau-Ponty and Nancy) that re-present the centrality of the relationship between the object of knowledge and the situated action of knowing, mediated by the perceptive activity and therefore by the aesthetic dimension it relates to.

In this sense, pedagogical research in education meets the museum space as part of a system of territorial policies that work on citizenship, social imaginary, identity and are able to activate participation and collaboration.

The call aims to intercept studies, reflections, and experiences emerging the construct 'museum' and the perspectives from which it can be traversed, with a particular focus on an 'ecological' vision that places it in a transdisciplinary sense in the process of constructing imaginary capable of reconfiguring landscapes knowledge and sensibilities.

Topics

1. Ecomuseum as an active education process for the community

The Ecomuseum is an instrument of change for the local development, as it is directly linked to the community and its territory, based on the participation and common interests of that same community, its ability to intervene and its possibility for heritage fruition in a holistic sense. Therefore, it is possible to say that in these spaces, based on community intervention and social participation, the local population is more than a museum user, but plays a role of effective action and organization.

2. The Ecomuseums in the early 21st century history of environmental and museal education

In recent years, several fruitful currents of educational and social activation have met in the museum field. Environmental education has combined ecological activism and scientific dissemination and has followed institutionalization trajectories by caring for, recovering and re-signifying urban or de-industrializing spaces as ecomuseums or thematic parks where people can experiment. Art and museum education tout court that cultivated new tools and workshop languages (also through the precariousness of qualified personnel who interacted with cultural institutions, publishing and communication field) flowed into teaching. All on the wave of a broader and renewed sensitivity towards the social function of museums, libraries, archives, and cultural heritage understood not as heritage to be exploited for profit but as an open space for a public of citizens rather than consumers. We welcome recognition of experiences and analysis of practices capable of assembling them in the framework of an educational mobilization that can be imagined as endowed with specific languages and forms of activation.

3. Museums and archives as spaces for researching and looking at social phenomena.

Museums are complex institutions whose heritage does not end in their exhibitions as much as in the collection and multichannel fruition of the materials of which they are expert conservators. Museums, with their permanent collections, are infrastructures called upon to contribute to the system of active cultural policies of a territory, through projects capable of engaging different communities and contributing to produce a plural vision of art, science and everyday life. From this perspective, Museums are part of an institutional system responsible for a history of ideas - imagination factory - that combines material and immaterial dimensions of cultural heritage and has the task of promoting research and study of those heritages in an ever-contemporary key.

4. Museums outside museums

Museum places, architectures, displays, their physical spaces extended also to crossmediality, digital and web, are ever-changing environments and realities that open to ever-different experiences and forms of interaction. In this trajectory, the world's Museums are acquiring a proactive role in the redefinition of urban spaces and public access. Museums are proposing a kaleidoscope of 'care' practices with a high social and territorial vocation that see cultural heritage as an engine and strategy for innovation and social cohesion, as well as local regeneration and development.

Proposed articles must be unpublished.

Articles can be submitted in Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese or French and sent by 25 June 2023 to redazione.educazioneaperta@gmail.com. The authors must strictly comply according to the editorial rules available at this link: https://educazioneaperta.it/guidelines.html

After a peer review process, the accepted articles will be published in number 14 of “Educazione Aperta”, scheduled for the winter of 2023-2024.

Fuerteventura Ecomuseo La Alcogida. Foto di Mal B (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mal-b/). Licenza CC BY-ND 2.0.