43 operationalised helps to realise particular kinds of worlds. This is the underpinning premise of the collaborative work on the Collecting, Ordering, Governing. Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government book, and the Heritage Futures project. Indeed, much of my work has actually focused on this question of the world-making capacities of different kinds of collective cultural and institutional practises. I started my career working with Indigenous Australians, and I have been significantly influenced by Indigenous philosophies of world-making, according to which, for example, singing a particular songline over a particular tract of land assembles the world in a specific way. The work of technicians in laboratories or the work of museum curators in museums also shapes particular kinds of worlds. And the world that we are in now has been integrally shaped by some of those practices within heritage institutions, which precisely emphasise the forms of human exceptionalism, the need for endless progress and the hierarchical understandings of race and culture which underpins so much social, economic and political inequality. These are all concepts that were developed in Western museums, in Western anthropology and Western archaeology. They were all developed for particular reasons, to develop a sort of Western white hegemony, which is precisely the kind of philosophical underpinning that we now need to challenge. Therefore, I think that museums and heritage organisations are not only deeply implicated in the crisis, but they also have a number of different roles to play in facilitating people to take action in the crisis, and to fundamentally rethink the way in which they work. It is not simply a matter of the ways in which arts and culture can facilitate the communication of climate data, which is often what arts or cultural organisations are asked to do – i.e., “here is this complicated data, can you help us communicate it in a way that makes them legible for the public?”. This process also requires a fundamental revision of the museum’s notions of expertise and of their understanding of their own role: their role may be to educate but it must also facilitate action. So, my point would be that heritage organisations of all kinds need to completely reform themselves and re-imagine what their roles are. Also from the perspective of the work that we did with the Heritage Futures project – which also fundamentally dealt with the role of creative speculation in developing productive and innovative future imaginaries, I think that what these organisations really need is to take seriously their claims to act on behalf of the future, not simply to use it as a sort of moral justification for “business as usual,” but to really engage with the concept of the future in a much more fundamental and realistic way. In the end, to me, these are the critical questions which cultural organisations need to address in relation to the climate crisis. * The project has been included in the “The Culture/Cultural Heritage and Climate Change Knowledge Base” published on the Fondazione’s website at the following link: < https:// www.fondazionescuolapatrimonio.it/innovazione-esperimentazione/the-culture-cultural-heritage-and-climatechange-knowledge-base/ > accessed 25 October 2022. Publications mentioned by the speakers in this section: T. Bennett, et. al., Collecting, Ordering, Governing. Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government (Duhram: Duke University Press, 2017).
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