The post-normal museum: Cultivating responsibility, empathy and creativity

The modern public museum, established in part to uphold allegedly universal norms of culture and conduct, has frequently proven ill-equipped in times of crisis when normative models no longer hold.In The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience (2022), historian Samuel J. Redman observes that these moments force museums to question their essential purpose.Although 'not always … dealt with effectively or understood accurately', crisis nevertheless tends to ferment 'forward-thinking, collaborative or creative solutions for helping us rethink museums'. 1 The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 brought one such moment, forcing museums across the world to close their doors and reconsider their public role.When most of these institutions reopened in 2021, however, the ambition to 'build back better' that animated the first year of the pandemic appeared to retreat before a hunger for 'business as usual'.The daily routine of acquiring, cataloguing, conserving and curating resumed as public programs were set back in motion, even while the complexity, chaos and contradictions of the world beyond museum walls heralded a transition to 'post-normal times'.Drawing from the frameworks for understanding such times proposed by Ziauddin Sardar, Jerome R. Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz, this article reflects on the idea of the museum that we have inherited and the potential transformation of this idea in times of crisis.The pandemic is not the primary focus; instead, it is recognised as a circuit-breaking catalyst-along with climate catastrophe, geopolitical conflict and economic collapse-of post-normal times.The third and final section of the article offers a set of ethical principles that may prove useful as we collectively navigate present uncertainties.These are intended neither to prescribe a new normative standard nor to propose a coherent definition with illustrative case studies of the 'post-normal museum'.Rather, it is hoped the ideals of responsibility, empathy and creativity here endorsed can furnish some inspiration for those who seek to ignite the transformative potential of our current moment.The anxieties and doubts provoked by the first year of the pandemic for museums across the world amply demonstrate the potentially radical effects of crisis that Redman traces in the historical development of the museum as a public institution.In March 2020, Joanna Cobley brought together a series of reflections written by museum workers and scholars for a special section of Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, a sequel to the focus on 1