Repatriation, Social Justice and Museums

This course encourages students to explore the relationship between social justice and museums with a focus on repatriation. It highlights the role that repatriation has and can play in advancing social justice, and the obstacles and responding strategies that have been presented. Participants will explore the role of repatriation as a social movement and investigate its influence in the development of new concepts in museum practice and policy, including decolonisation and new museology. The course critically reflects on the role of museums in the colonisation process and its impact, and the role they can play within 20th and 21st century social justice movements. It will consider repatriation as a site of resistance and a means to disturb dominant narratives about curated heritage and its management. The course explores methods of community engagement and the ways that museums have produced internal and external change as exemplified in key repatriation/museum case studies. It consider the link between repatriation, healing, reconciliation and nation-building. Course themes are explored through consideration of a wide range of collecting institutions including the work of local community museums and heritage centres. Repatriation as a social movement is explored broadly, including through understanding of the return of knowledge, archives, audiovisual materials, cultural materials and ancestral remains. How legal and other regulatory instruments connect with/link museums and repatriation is investigated. From an Indigenous perspective, the course explores key terms such as 'justice' 'self-determination', 'heritage' and 'reconciliation' to problematise and understand the role and potential of repatriation, museums and community collections to contribute to advancing social justice for colonised peoples whose cultural and bodily remains became part of institutional collections in Australia and worldwide.