Transformations and Uncomfortability in the Museum Context: A Narrative Literature Review

In recent decades, museums have increasingly become active in social debates, developing tools to tackle global inequalities and highlighting the difficult cultural heritages of the past. This work may raise uncomfortability in the museum field and link museum education to transformation and transformative learning. This narrative literature review of 42 recent articles examines museum research from the viewpoint of perspective transformation, exploring the uncomfortability that this process may induce. It draws upon transformative learning theory as its theoretical basis. Results show that museums actively aim at collective and individual transformations, though transformativity is rarely explicitly defined in the research. Additionally, the uncomfortability inherent in transformative processes is rarely considered. Thus, a unified terminology is urgently needed as well as a robust theoretical foundation for research on transformation in and around the museum context.