Coming Back to the Work: Why Museums and Democracy Still Matter
An opening reflection in a short series on museums, democracy, and radical imagination
It’s been about six months since I last published something here.
That pause wasn’t a disappearance, and it wasn’t a loss of interest. It was a shift—one that pulled me deeper into the everyday realities of working inside a nonprofit organization again. Over the past year, I’ve been spending more time navigating leadership, operations, constraints, and care from within, rather than writing and consulting from the outside.
And if I’m honest, that kind of work required more listening than broadcasting. More attention to people, systems, connections, and relationships than to polished arguments or finished ideas. Writing didn’t stop mattering—it simply took a back seat to being present.
Still, the questions that have animated Agents of Change from the beginning never went away. If anything, they’ve grown sharper and more relevant. So I want to interrupt this pause with a series of posts that focus in on museums, democracy, and radical imagination.
Why return to this now?
Across the world, democratic institutions are under strain. We’re seeing the erosion of democratic norms, the rise of authoritarian and exclusionary movements, and growing pressure on public institutions to retreat into silence or so-called neutrality. Museums, of course, are not immune to these forces. In fact, they have frequently been front and center in thee debates.
In so many places, museum professionals are facing restrictions on what stories they can tell, whose voices they can center, and what kinds of community-centered or equity-focused work is deemed acceptable (or even fundable). The growing influence of conservative political parties and government institutions is reshaping the landscape in which museums operate.
And yet—despite all of this—museums remain places where people gather. They are spaces where difficult histories are confronted, where care and belonging are negotiated, and where communities still come together to ask hard questions about the past, present, and future.
That tension—between constraint and possibility—is where this series lives.
Where this series comes from
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote address for the German Museums Association and later publish an article in Museumskunde (2025), the Association’s annual journal. The piece, titled “Radical Imagination and the Democratic Museum: Envisioning Bold Futures for Community-Centered Change,” reflects several years of thinking, learning, and working alongside museum professionals and community partners across different contexts, including within Germany.
This series of posts grows directly out of that article—but it’s not a simple reposting. Instead, I want to slow the ideas down, open them up, and bring them back into conversation with you: museum workers, educators, leaders, artists, and cultural practitioners trying to do meaningful work in increasingly complex conditions.
What I’ll be exploring
Over the next few posts, I’ll be sharing reflections grounded in three interconnected ideas that feel especially urgent right now:
Museums as sites of participatory democracy, where power is shared rather than simply displayed.
Radical imagination as a democratic capacity, not a luxury or abstraction.
Community-centered change, even—and especially—under restrictive political conditions.
This series is not about offering neat solutions or pretending this work is easy. It’s about naming the complexity of doing values-driven work inside institutions that are political, constrained, and often contradictory—and still choosing to act with integrity, care, and courage.
An invitation
If you’ve been part of Agents of Change for a while, thank you for staying connected—even during the quiet stretches. And if you’re new here, welcome. I’m glad you’ve found your way to this space.
My hope is that this upcoming series offers:
language for what many of us are feeling but struggling to articulate,
examples that expand what feels possible inside real institutions, and
a reminder that democracy isn’t only something museums talk about—it’s something we practice, daily, in relationship with one another.
First up in this series will be: why the democratic museum is not neutral—and never has been. Stay tuned.
“Museums as sites of participatory democracy,”
Yes, and thank you for all the good work you do on this front.