Contemporary museums as pedagogic contact zones: Potentials of critical cultural adult education

In this article, we position museums as ‘pedagogic contact zones’, sites fraught with both problems and potential. Using five stories drawn from our work and engagement with public museums over the past five years in Canada, England and Scotland, we illustrate how contemporary practices of critical cultural pedagogy work to construct, deconstruct, reconstruct, disrupt, dislocate, interrogate and decolonise. We argue that the critical and creative adult educators in museums today, coupled with new exhibitionary practices, make museums important, complex and engaging sites of adult education that are alive with visual, performative and experiential practices of social and self critique in the interests of justice and change.