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The Next Horizon

The Next Horizon of Museum Practice: Voluntary Repatriation, Restitution, and Reparations

Collections lie at the heart of most museums, so naturally, values regarding the ownership and control of collections are central to museum ethics. In 2023, AAM launched the Voluntary Repatriation, Restitution, and Reparations project to explore where these changes may lead us decades hence.

To explore the next horizon of museum practice, AAM invited a diverse array of writers to share their visions for what preferable futures might look like with respect to voluntary repatriation, restitution, and reparations. The resulting collection includes:

  • opinion pieces,
  • predictions of where current trends and events might lead us in the future,
  • and fiction that immerses readers in these possible futures.

By sharing these visions of potential futures, AAM hopes to provide museum people with the inspiration that fuels change and the courage to disrupt any current practice that is no longer fit for its purpose.


A white woman with shoulder length brown hair stands in a hallway wearing dark rimmed glasses.
Laura Van Broekhoven, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Hope in Solidarity: Building Trust Towards Cultural Care and Repair

An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which museums can be part of a process of societal healing by enabling community-led work towards reconciliation and prioritizing listening, cultural care, and epistemological equity.

A black man stands in front of two different flags wearing traditional African garments.
Dr. Fonyuy Edward Bulami, PhD, The University of Bamenda-Bambili, Cameroon

Restitution and Digitization of African Cultural Heritage: Time to Decolonize and Reconceptualize African Preservation Spaces

An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which African heritage conversation and exhibition spaces will be re-baptized as “shrineums” rather than “museums,” with a matching infrastructural reconceptualization based on community cultural sensitivities and epistemic knowledge systems.

A bald white bearded man stands in front of a large stained glass window wearing a dark colored suit wiht a blue tie.
Yoel Finkelman, Collections
Department, Yad Vashem Archive

A Future of Collaboration: Case Studies of Provenance Dilemmas Regarding Jewish Communal Property

An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which a network of individuals and institutions see preservation and accessibility of Jewish textual heritage as a joint responsibility.


A white woman with short brown hair looks directly in the camera wearing a dark colored top and beaded necklace.
Alex Hanesworth, Project Director of Digital Media, The Center for Restorative History
A black woman with shoulder length dark hair stands in front of an outdoor staircase wearing a fuchsia colored jacket over a dark colored top.
Jessica Harris, President, Descendants of Enslaved Communities at the University of Virginia
A white woman with short light colored hair stands in front of a wooden sculpture smiling.
Ernestine Hayes, Professor Emerita, University of Alaska Southeast

The Gallery Has a Dance Floor Now

A speculative fiction piece exploring a future in which right relationships between people, their objects, and the stewards of those objects have been rebuilt and a new kind of museum an emerge.

From Preservation to Reparation: Descendant Engagement and Museums

An opinion piece envisioning a future in which descendants of enslaved communities have an equitable, reparative seat at the table as we strive toward true repair and stronger museums.

A Burdened Past, An Unburdened Future

An opinion piece exploring a future in which everything that was taken grows old and dies where it belongs.


A bearded white man with light brown to reddish brown hair stands outside wearing a blue and white plaid shirt.
David Zvi Kalman, Research Fellow,
Shalom Hartman Institute
A bearded white man with silver hair and beard stands outside wearing a dark colored t-shirt.
Marc Masurovksy, Co-founder
Holocaust Art Restitution Project
A white woman with shoulder length reddish blonde hair leans against a brick wall wearing a checkered jacket with a dark colored shirt and two gold colored necklaces.
Brooke M. Morgan, PhD, Curator of
Anthropology, Illinois State Museum

Descent

A work of speculative fiction exploring a future in which the provenance of an object can be exhibited with a power equal to or exceeding the actual object.

What’s Provenance is Prologue

An opinion piece exploring a future in which museums treat the provenance of an object as equally worthy of storytelling as its creation, especially in the case of looted or stolen works.

Museum as Way Station: Reframing Repositories as Part of Objects Journeys

An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which museums recognize they are but one stop on a cultural object’s journey and returning an object to its community of origin continues its life process.


Two images side by side the one on the left shows a black woman with short black hair smiles wearing a patterned jacked and dark colored turtleneck and long pink earrings. The image on the right shows a black woman with braided black hair piled on the top of her head wearing light rimmed glasses and a colorful blouse.
Victoria Phiri Chitungu and Samba Yonga, Livingstone Museum and Women’s History Museum, Zambia
A native Hawaiian man stands outside with short dark brown hair wearing a red and white checkered and patterned short sleeve shirt and a Lai necklace.
Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, PhD,
Associate Curator of Native Hawaiian
History and Culture, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian
Institution
Three people in separate headshot photos far left is a white man with short brown hair and a dark beard wearing dark rimmed glasses, center is a white woman with straight brown hair pulled back from her face, wearing a dark colored button down shirt, far right is a bald white man with a fill beard wearing wire rimmed glasses and a purple colored button down shirt.
Fabio Mariani, Lynn Rother, and Max Koss Provenance Lab, Leuphana University Lüneburg

Sharing Digital Heritage: The Case of a Digital Repatriation in the Gwembe Valley of Zambia

An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which digital repatriation can be a means in which African cultural objects in foreign museums are reconnected with their embedded Indigenous knowledge and communities of origin in Africa.

Navigating Museum Currents and Futures: Lessons From Oceania

A future in which museums in Oceania and the people working within them are still here modeling ways in which museums can expand their horizons while learning from our collective past.

The Future of Provenance: Digital Cataloguing as Reparative Practice

An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which provenance records are digitally available, linked across constituents, and shaped by various perspectives.


A black woman stands smiling in front of a white backdrop with long braided hair pulled partially into a topknot with a silver nosering wearing a white button down shirt.
Aisha Shillingford, Artistic Director,
Intelligent Mischief
A white woman stands in front of greenery with long brown hair and short bangs wearing a dark teal colored top and scarf with long colorful earrings.
Lyssa C. Stapleton, PhD, Director, The
Waystation Initiative, UCLA Cotsen
Institute of Archaeology
A white woman stands outdoors holding a plant with light colored hair pulled up on top of her head wearing a white t-shirt and green colored bottoms.
Susan Thorpe, Pou Rangahau Kōiwi/Repatriation Researcher, Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme, Te Papa Tongarewa/Museum of New Zealand

An Oddity Amongst Antiquities: A Mystery at the Bureau

A work of speculative fiction exploring a future in which descendants of those enslaved in the US and communities in sub-Saharan Africa use the stories, hidden histories and spiritual values of stolen artifacts to reconnect communities that have long been separated by enslavement and colonialism and repair the social and spiritual harm that was caused.

Object Destinies: What Is a Better Future for Materials Culture in Institutional Collections?

An academic foresight paper that reimagines the values and mission of collecting institutions as part of a future in which the ownership of collections of cultural objects is in the hands of the people who created the or their descendants.

Twenty Years of Persistence, Two Hundred Years of Patience

An academic foresight paper exploring a future in which repatriation is completed and we are working collectively to tell the stories of removal, theft, accession, and subsequent restoration and redress.


This project is generously supported by

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