Center for the Future of Museums Blog

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Futurist Friday: Building the Future By Understanding the Past

By Elizabeth Merritt

We know we don’t know what the future will be. We can deal with that–that’s what strategic foresight is for.Far more corrosive is the misconception that we do know the past.In fact, the past and the future are mirror …
Thinking About Inclusive Museums in the UK

By Elizabeth Merritt

Hi, Nicole here! As part of my work as a Mellon/ACLS fellow with CFM, I’m focusing on a constellation of issues related to museums and labor, including pathways to museum employment; wage equity in the sector; workforce practices promoting …
Museums and Migration

By Elizabeth Merritt

Mass migration, driven by conflict, oppression, political upheaval, climate change and economic distress, has been described as “the defining issue of this century.” As such, it is one of many critical issues that museums can address in …
Monday Musing: Beyond Conformity & Compliance

By Elizabeth Merritt

Here’s an article I encourage you to read to start your week: Sir Ken Robinson: How to Create a Culture For Valuable Learning (Mind/Shift, KQED News). Sir Ken has been a major inspiration for my work on museums and the future of …
Futurist Friday: Empathetic AI

By Elizabeth Merritt

Whenever a new technology starts to take off (drones, 3D printing, Virtual Reality), the initial breathless coverage in the press is inevitably followed by articles deriding the trivial applications of these advances. We’re deluged …
Free your mind! Funky futures & transformative education

By Elizabeth Merritt

“If you free your mind, you free your relationship to time”—George Clinton, funky musician and Afrofuturist Vibrant (adjective): Full of energy and enthusiasm. Pulsating. Bright and Striking… Learning (noun): The acquisition of …
Send Me to SxSW to Spread the Word about Museum Awesomeness

By Elizabeth Merritt

I need your help to create a future in which encounters like this don’t happen: At a convening of all sorts of important education types—foundation staff, teachers, policy makers—one of the participants turns to the chair of EdCom and …
Monday Musing: unbiased wages

By Elizabeth Merritt

A few weeks ago I tweeted about a post by the estimable Vu Le in which he argued that “basing pay on salary history is a harmful, borderline-unethical practice that we need to abolish.” He points out that calibrating salary …
Futurist Friday: Who Will You Care For? Who Will Care For You?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Many of my friends are members of the “sandwich generation”–caring both for children and for their own parents. That’s difficult enough right now, and as a new report from the Institute for the Future (IFTF) points …
The Community Futures Lab: Oral Histories, Oral Futures, and Quantum Time

By Elizabeth Merritt

This is Nicole with a bit of field reporting about futurist work in practice. Last week, I traveled to Philadelphia, PA to visit the Community Futures Lab, a project of the Black Quantum Futurism collective. Co-founder Rasheedah Phillips …