Professor Françoise Vergès to explore the "Post-Museum" as Banister Fletcher Fellow

As part of the 2025 Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship in Urban Studies, Professor Vergès’s project will ask what the role of museums is in these times of distress yet hope, against a background of war, structural violence, growing social inequities and the rise of extremist movements. Whereas exhaustivity (collecting as much as possible the same artefact) was a guiding principle for the Western universal museum, what should guide current and future forms of collecting: collecting what, for whom, to what end, how and where? 

Museums of Paris and London are taking significant initiatives to answer the historical demands for change: better representation of minorities, of women artists, of different art histories. They are following the roads opened for decades by feminist, queer, Black, Asian, postcolonial, decolonial scholars, art historians and artists). But is this enough? What does it mean to imagine the “Post-Museum”, guided by different relations to the city? What spaces and practices can address the demands for new modes of conservation and exhibition, new practices of documentation and pedagogies, responsive to genocide, to climate crisis, to mass migrations and exile. How will the “post-museum” be informed by what some commentators are calling “multipolarity” and the loss of Western hegemony?  

Professor Vergès’s work will be programmed in partnership with city-based organisations, including the Mosaic Rooms in London and the Cité des arts in Paris, and practitioners and researchers from across Europe and North Africa. It will involve workshops in London and Paris, open to doctoral students and scholars of all backgrounds and associations. Its aim is to offer a sustained opportunity to extend the public conversation on the role of the Western museum in the urban landscape from within two of the world’s imperial capitals, home to the phenomenal museum legacies of this political and demographic history.