The need for and impact of Object Based Learning (OBL) takes on particular relevance in institutions such as anthropology museums. Although museums in general have moved in the last several decades toward a renewed focus on their social impacts, anthropology museums in particular have needed to grapple with their own histories and the kinds of…

In the research subfield of social media memory studies (Birkner & Donk, 2020), digital memory of relevant historical events has its own scholarship and avenues of publication (e.g., Garde-Hansen et al., 2009; Hoskins, 2011). As for the specific area of Holocaust studies, with the passing of the generation that witnessed and experienced the…

This article examines how the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) comes to invoke, realize, and mediate museum publics. The author writes that she is interested in how the museum's architecture, rhetoric, and governance framings imagine, and engage with the public. As Canada's newest national museum and the first to be built outside of the…

Author Julie Pelletier recently became part of a new committee at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR): the Indigenous Education Working Group (IEWG). The IEWG is a working group made up of Indigenous individuals with a background in indigenous education. The first project the IEWG undertook was assisting with the development of Indigenous…

In this commentary, the authors propose than an intersectionality perspective can transform understandings of the contentious content of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR). The use of an intersectionality perspective starts from the position that such discourses as racialization, gendering, capitalism, and ableism are mutually…

From atop the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), juts the Tower of Hope, a 23-story illuminated glass architectural feature meant to symbolize "the goal of the human-rights journey," namely, "hope for a changed world." The prominence of hope as an ideal is literally set in stone at the CMHR. Hope for the museum itself is…

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) has been plagued by controversy since before its construction even began. Outcries regarding perceived oversights in the museum's programming and objections to the cost of construction, curatorial development, and staffing have erupted frequently in local media. Critical analyses of public responses to…

Analysis of how histories of violence are represented and received in cultural institutions such as museums and memorials is frequently framed in terms of conflict and hierarchies or competitions of suffering. In this article the author proposes a framework that imagines the broader and interconnected networks in which museum narratives and ideas…

In this article, Avner Segall explores some pedagogical processes in the context of two museums in Washington, DC, that focus on difficult knowledge, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In doing so, Segall's aim is not to explore the museums as a whole or provide a comprehensive…

Ethnology museums are pedagogical. As educators attempting to make sense of how museums teach about the world, the authors of this article are especially interested in how ethnology museums curate otherness through objects, texts, and spaces, and how these combine to present a narrative of others. Ellsworth has referred to this as the…

One only needs to look at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) logo, with its abstract outline of the CMHR building, to see the way in which the museum's architecture has come to stand for the CMHR's immaterial meanings and content. The CMHR's architecture becomes a material intersection of discourses of cosmopolitanism, human rights, and…

Organizations like the Native Women's Association of Canada have been working tirelessly for well over a decade to draw attention to the scope of the problem of violence against Indigenous women, and by 2010 (the year in which federal funding for their research, education, and policy initiative on violence against Indigenous women and girls was…

Paulo Freire's notion that education is politics is well known to readers involved in areas of critical education, and thus a detailed rehearsal of the burgeoning literature illustrating and elaborating on this view is not necessary. After all, this view has a very long, albeit repressed, history, which anticipates Freire and those who took up the…

The last twenty years have witnessed a number of studies in education, primarily within global education (Ball 2012), that have considered those processes forming the nation. It also seeks to advance the role of school in establishing an imagined community that promotes a collective identity (Trofanenko 2005). Education is expected by some to lay…

When entering the permanent exhibit titled "Living in America" in the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn, Michigan, visitors are greeted with a sign that reads "Ahlan wa Sahlan." It is a greeting that translates in English to: "Your path is easier now that you are with us." The visitor, "you,"…