Telling Stories, Raising Awareness, Creating Opportunities for Change: Exhibition Proposals for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

摘要

This article introduces 9 module proposals that were designed for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, Canada. These proposals grew out of my graduate seminar, Museums, National Identity and Public Memory (winter semester, 2011) and were the result of collaborative work involving myself as professor, the students, and members of the Research and Curation Department at the CMHR. Although none of the proposals may be realized in the museum, which is due to open in 2014, they raise some significant issues concerning how stories of individual and collective rights speak to human rights issues, how best to represent these often complex topics to the general public, and how to engage the public in a meaningful dialogue on human rights. In all, then, they point to the very real challenges of curating and interpreting complicated and contested content in a national museum. The introduction provides readers with an overview of the topics discussed in the proposals selected for this section of the special issue.