Rebecca Keller started Excavating History with site-specific interventions in an anatomy theatre in Estonia in 2006. Her method has since become a course, a collective, and a series of exhibitions in historic sites in the United States and Europe. This book documents and expands on her pedagogical approaches, including numerous works from her student collaborators, and a section with advice for educators and potential excavators who want to pursue projects of their own.

HOW DO MUSEUMS RESPOND TO THE URGENCY OF THE MOMENT?

In what ways can museums be critically transformed to foster social justice work? Fwd: Museums, an inclusive, cross disciplinary publication, shares interventions, experiments, and community dialogues within and outside of museums. Our contributors reexamine, critique, and challenge museums as socially responsible spaces.

In our seventh issue, "Manifesto," encompassing more than just a declaration put into writing, these pages are the catalysts to spark action and inspire change. Our contributors, artists, professors, museum professionals, students, and others face our present difficulties and imagine bold new solutions and futures.

To be in transit is to be human. No one does well staying still too long. This past year has shown us more than ever that nothing is ever permanent.

In this journal we explore the different ways that people, museums, and institutions can be considered in transit. We are addressing questions of tradition, culture, movement, and remaking. We acknowledge that tradition is not necessarily a bad thing, but tradition is the product of an established stability and in this journal we are concerned with what must be changed because our world is constantly in flux.

We invite our readers to transport from one idea to another as they journey within these works. We ask our readers to consider the museum and how we as museum and cultural practitioners in the 21st century can grapple with the spectrum of changes that should take place now and in our future. How do cultures shift? How should our institutions shift alongside and represent change? In what way are we always moving?

How do museums respond to the urgency of the moment?

In what ways can they be transformed to foster justice work? Fwd: Museums Journal, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed publication, shares critical analysis, interventions, and dialogs focused on museums and other sites of cultural work. Our contributors reexamine, critique and challenge museums as socially responsive spaces.

Museums Are Dead.

They fell victim to torch-bearing mobs, looters, and the vociferous contempt of political and religious groups. But perhaps also through insular pedagogies, inequitable practices, and a lack of representation or transparency, museums contributed to their own demise.

In our current social climate, it has become critical that we, as students, teachers, employees and participants of the museum, reflect on our roles within the white marble walls of the establishments we hold dear. The articles in the following pages represent the curiosity, research, perspective and tenacity required to lay the old museum to rest in order to allow the new museum to thrive.

How do museums respond to the urgency of the moment?

In what ways can they be transformed to foster justice work? Fwd: Museums Journal, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed publication, shares critical analysis, interventions, and dialogs focused on museums and other sites of cultural work. Our contributors reexamine, critique and challenge museums as socially responsive spaces.

Museums, like all other social institutions, reflect the tensions and contradictions of their times. The Museum and Exhibition Studies (MUSE) Graduate Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago proposes that these museum problems are deeply seeded in the field and its professions. It’s likely that their remedies will require some equally deep—radical—change and reimagining. Responding to the urgencies of the moment and recognizing the need to transform museums and our cultural work within their spaces, MUSE offers this new journal. Fwd: Museums signals a desire to lift up and forward ideas that might push our collective thinking. This volume explores the theme of inaugurations, or firsts and beginnings, with over 20 contributions from scholars and creative practitioners.