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This article examines the challenges museums face amid growing political disillusionment and extremism. Based on interviews with museum educators, it discusses how hate impacts their daily work. The article aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how polarization is experienced and navigated in museum education, arguing that museums must raise awareness of how public hostility operates within their institutions. Emphasizing the importance of fostering inclusive spaces for dialogue on sensitive issues, the article advocates for better institutional support, training, and national-level discussions to address hate in educational settings.

Den resultatorienterade kultur som idag präglar de statliga museerna gör att mångfald, inkludering och social hållbarhet återkommande försummas. Nu behövs en diskussion om hållbara lösningar för att tillgodose att museerna kan fortsätta främja social inkludering, skriver Charlotte Engman, postdoktor i museologi.

‘Decolonisation’ is a frequently used expression in museum contexts, and a growing museal practice. In ethnographic museums, such attempts are usually performed in the shape of projects that seek to establish new relationships with source– or diasporan communities. However, little research has been produced about how these practices relate to the political demands and expectations set on state museums, and how they are shaped in a Swedish context. By following the project Ongoing Africa at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, the thesis aims to explore how different museal logics condition activities, are reproduced, and relate to each other. The empirical data consists of interviews with museum staff and collaborators engaged in the project, observations of project activities, and written data such as policy documents and government publications.

The findings show that tension and ambivalence characterise museal decoloniality. Along with ideals of social inclusion, co-creation and decolonial agendas, the museal economy is being eroded and activities market-adjusted, at the same time as the museum is also expected to be educative and authoritarian. While museum professionals struggle with creating relevance for the museum and the collections, the latter has been discursively fragmented through contemporary investments in heritage justice and repatriation discourse. To external stake holders, the ethnographic collection symbolises ongoing forms of colonial violence and heritage items that contribute to diasporan identity formation. Furthermore, the public museum is today a place where contemporary anti-racist ideology manifest itself through silences performed in relation to racialisation, and knowledge is at the museum a contingent and relational practice.