Conference Agenda

With political malaise having settled firmly into the national consciousnesses of Europe and North America, inquiry into the moribund status of education for democratic habits of mind now seems more pressing than ever. Although much educational philosophy has been devoted to assessing the state of democratic education in schools, little attention has been directed toward democratic education in museums. Scholarship on the “out-of-school” curriculum and other forms of “public pedagogy” has typically focused on popular culture, social media, and internet culture. Museum pedagogy has not so readily been attended to, with the result that philosophical insights into the potential of non-compulsory forms of education (for both children and adults) to promote democratic habits of mind go missing.

Drawing on Jurgen Habermas’s theory of the rationalization of the lifeworld, I argue that as formal, informal, and nonformal learning environments, museums function as a contact zone between institutional and individual rationalities. I distinguish this zone of rationality from how museums are typically understood as contact zones, which in the field of museum studies has been driven primarily by anthropological analyses (Boast, 2011). Pratt (1991) refers to contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (p. 34). Building on Pratt’s formulation, Clifford writes, “When museums are seen as contact zones, their organizing structure as a collection becomes an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship” (p. 190). Kreps thinks of museum encounters in terms of “cultural hybridization,” which she characterizes as “a more dynamic and even empowering approach to understanding contemporary processes of cultural contact and exchange” (p. 15). However, cultural hybridization is not power neutral; the terms of cultural exchange are rarely equal. My paper theorizes the museum contact zone as a space in which the communicative reason inherent to interpersonal communication encounters the functional rationality of the institution. Like cultural hybridization, what I call rational hybridization is never power neutral.

Whether positioning themselves as a forum or temple (Cameron, 2012), museums operate according to an organizational logic that has been conditioned by Enlightenment values that are rationalist, universalist, and empiricist. (Kitromilides, 1992). These values significantly reinforce lifeworld systems that are functionalist in orientation. Habermas (1984) uses the term lifeworld to refer to the web of societal beliefs, values, and behavioral norms that serves as the backdrop for communicative action. Habermas (1987) notes, “Insofar as speakers and hearers straightforwardly achieve a mutual understanding about something in the world, they move within the horizon of their common lifeworld; this remains in the background of the participants—as intuitively known, unproblematic, and unanalyzable, holistic background” (p. 337). Museums serve as communicative spaces in which lifeworlds are mediated, rationalized, and reproduced, and museum education unfolds within “the context-forming horizon of the lifeworld, from within which participants in communication come to an understanding with one another about something.” (Habermas, 1984, p. 337).