From mitigation to creativity: the agency of museums and science centres and the means to govern climate change

Abstract

Climate change as a complex, scientific, cultural, ideological, and transnational issue poses a new set of challenges for museums and science centres as places to inform, and as information sources in debates and decision processes. In this paper, I draw on quantitative and qualitative research from the Australian Research Council funded Linkage project, Hot Science, Global Citizens: the agency of the museum sector in climate change interventions, to interrogate the potentialities for institutions to operate meaningfully and in new ways in complex media ecologies and dense mediations of political, social, scientific discourses, and expertize. In developing the concepts liquid governmentalities and liquid museums, I pose new leverage points for institutions to operate within these pluralistic and complex governmental assemblages from one of the production of science statements to reform behaviour, to systems of open peer review and as places for facilitating complex reflexivity and creative dispositions for the future in the present.