Reparative Museology and Its Limits

Bibliographic Data

ID11280641
AuthorsC Sterling (0000-0002-0423-6796, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume43
Issue4
Pages33-57
Publication date2025-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Text (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/01642472-11960446
OpenAlexW4417513030
LanguageEN
References cited27

In recent years the notion of repair has taken center stage in many artistic projects, curatorial programs, and wider museological initiatives. This turn to repair encompasses sometimes conflicting issues and agendas, from object restitution and demands for restorative justice to well-being programs and remedial approaches to ecological harm. This article maps and critiques the turn to repair in the museum world, examining both the potentials and limitations of this framework for critical museological thinking and practice. Drawing on a series of case studies connecting European and North American museums to other contexts globally, the article highlights how reparative initiatives — while often framed as transformative — are routinely constrained by institutional logics that prioritize reform over meaningful or lasting systemic change. To understand these dynamics, the article moves from material conceptions of repair through psychoanalytic notions of the reparative and on to decolonial mobilizations of repair as a worldmaking project. The article concludes by theorizing reparative abolition as a new horizon for critical transformative praxis within and beyond museums

Existentialism · Object (grammar · Praxis · Reflexivity · Restitution · Restorative justice · Transformative learning · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Museology · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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