We live off of prejudices, reassuring perceptions about others, rarely acquired by first person experiences.
We label identities to survive to complexity and feel safe within our groups. It’s us and them, in-group and out-group. Our identities are faceted, and described through many adjectives. “Theirs” are often encompassed in a single word: they could be migrants, people with disabilities, Roma or LGBTQ people, for example.
Through our organisations, depending on their awareness, we can support social inclusion and try to dismantle stereotypes (private, public, implicit) through different strategies, visible or invisible: from exhibits to interpretation, from diversity job placement to policies’ definition to leadership involvement to many others.
We would like museums to be politically and socially engaged: never neutral but places aimed at generating cultural and social impacts through provocative narratives of who we are. In other words, trustable institutions aware of paradoxes around the topic of diversity and inclusion and able, at the same time, to stimulate a complex perception about issues of diversity and identity.
Museums and Stereotypes 