Sterling, Colin. 2025. Reparative Museology and Its Limits. Social Text 43(4), 33-57
This article in Social Text expands on earlier writing around museums and repair.
Abstract
In recent years the notion of repair has taken center stage in many artistic projects, curatorial programs, and wider museological initiatives. This turn to repair encompasses sometimes conflicting issues and agendas, from object restitution and demands for restorative justice to well‐being programs and remedial approaches to ecological harm. This article maps and critiques the turn to repair in the museum world, examining both the potentials and limitations of this framework for critical museological thinking and practice. Drawing on a series of case studies connecting European and North American museums to other contexts globally, the article highlights how reparative initiatives — while often framed as transformative — are routinely constrained by institutional logics that prioritize reform over meaningful or lasting systemic change. To understand these dynamics, the article moves from material conceptions of repair through psychoanalytic notions of the reparative and on to decolonial mobilizations of repair as a worldmaking project. The article concludes by theorizing reparative abolition as a new horizon for critical transformative praxis within and beyond museums.
Colin Sterling 