Towards Ecocritical Museology: Reimagining Cultural Sustainability in the Age of the Anthropocene

At a time when museums are increasingly described as “agents of change”, it is necessary to ask what kind of change they enact and within which ontological framework this role unfolds. This article introduces ecocritical museology as a theoretical-speculative framework that brings the environmental and community-based tradition of the ecomuseum into dialogue with post-humanist museology and philosophy. It argues that current models of cultural sustainability, particularly as framed by the SDGs, remain embedded in modernist and anthropocentric ontologies of development and therefore fail to generate substantive institutional transformation. The museum is conceived as an ontological apparatus that represents but actively co-produces more-than-human relations and values. The article presents methodological approaches that allow museums to be analyzed as situated assemblages and to open speculative spaces for institutional practice. Within this framework, cultural sustainability is redefined not as the preservation of heritage but as the creation of conditions for terrestrial, multispecies coexistence.