RESEARCH IN OTHER FORMS: REPORTS, ARTICLES, CONVERSATIONS ETC.

This article, a short critical analysis, explores dominant social and museological approaches to understanding museum collections made from current-day political crises. It focuses on events and collections in the US, a nation that has a museum sector directly tied up in political decision-making and crises since its inception (Message 2014) and reeling more acutely from events leading up to and surrounding the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. The article does not universalize the American experience in relation to either museological trends or broader twenty-first-century political crises. Its reflections are based on observation of political and museological activity occurring in Washington, DC and New York. Rather than working toward building a set of prescriptions to determine “what we might learn” (Campbell in Judkis and McCarthy 2021) from the US cases discussed, I probe conceptual difficulties and consider some of the theoretical ways in which the challenges of representing crisis in contemporary society have been approached in my own research observations and that of others across various disciplinary fields. I focus on the challenges for museums arising from collecting and interpreting the two perhaps unlikely but temporally contingent examples: First, the global COVID-19 pandemic that emerged early in 2019 and continues in March 2022 as I write this article, and second, the violent attack on the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC on 6 January 2021, when supporters of US President Donald Trump sought to overturn his 2020 election defeat by disrupting the Congressional count of electoral votes that would formalize President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Central to the article is my contention that a conflation of crisis and normalcy has occurred and perhaps even become a uniquely familiar experience in recent years, despite our continuing expectation for crisis to function as an interruption.