Ideology of Heritage, Museum, Cultural Politics, and Construction of National Identity in Finland and Japan.

This is an ongoing research project, "Ideology of Heritage, Museum, Cultural Politics, and Construction of National Identity in Finland and Japan", funded by the Kone Foundation (January 2021- June 2023), Kalevala Koru Cultural Foundation (2020) and Finnish National Agency for Education (2020). This project pursues a theoretical and practical model of the future museum direction. Although this research started as comparative studies between the Finnish and Japanese national museums and their cultural politics, it has developed further into a broader philosophical and theoretical approach to studying the museums and their decolonising discourse through the lens of the current world system as Ramón Grosfoguel (2011) described it as 'Capitalist/Patriarchal Westerncentric/ Christian-centric Modern/Colonial World-System'. Museums are about power and part of this hegemonic structure, even though many institutions are trying to move away from it, seeking more just practices. Decolonising museums demands studying the unjust of the current world system. Rather than narrowing it down, I broadened my research twofold; comparative studies of the national museums in Finland and Japan as a case study; and decolonising museums, universities and knowledge as theoretical arguments and experiments. This is a transdisciplinary and indisciplined transdisciplinary (Castro-Gómez et al. 2002: 13–14, translated by Juan Carlos Finck Carrales and Julia Suárez-Krabbe 2022, 23) article-based project; four articles for the doctoral thesis study the national museums between Finland and Japan, and three to four articles explicitly written on decolonising discourses outside my doctoral thesis.

Keywords:CULTURAL HERITAGE, MUSEUMS

Disciplines:Futures studies, Museum studies, Critical heritage

Project type:Collaboration project