Critical Diversity Literacy in Museum- and Gallery Education: Historical Grounds, Present Challenges
Workshop and Talk— Carmen Mörsch
In the first part, the Workshop will introduce the concept of “Critical Diversity Literacy”, a concept for social justice education that has been developed by Melissa Steyn, a white South African communication studies scholar.
One of the indicators of Critical Diversity Literacy is the consciousness about the continuity of power-relations (referring to taxonomies of race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability etc.) which have evolved during the European Enlightenment. This is especially significant for the field of museum- and gallery education, as will be shown in the second part of the workshop in a paper called “Trapped in History: Gallery Education, Coloniality, Patriarchy and white Femininity”. The paper will sketch different historical and geographical situations in which white middleclass anglophone women made use of art education as a space for their visibility and for liberation from rigid moral regimes. At the same time and connected with this, the construction of inferior, classist and racialized Otherness thereby appears as a recurring discursive practice to justify this place in the public realm.
In the final part of the workshop, groups will discuss the relevance of the different indicators of Critical Diversity Literacy. The question will be raised: Concerning the historical continuities, how do we conceive our work as a critical and anti-discriminatory research and educational practice?