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Teaching beyond the Performance of Hope? Museum Education Addressing 'Urgent Archives' and Building Nuanced Discourses on Hopeful Futurities

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Title: Teaching beyond the Performance of Hope? Museum Education Addressing 'Urgent Archives' and Building Nuanced Discourses on Hopeful Futurities
Language: English
Authors: Girinandini Singh (ORCID 0009-0006-9964-7307)
Source: Art Education. 2025 78(3):15-24.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 10
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Evaluative
Descriptors: Museums, Nonschool Educational Programs, Peace, Art Education, Psychological Patterns, Humanistic Education, Listening, Foreign Countries
Geographic Terms: United Kingdom (Cambridge)
DOI: 10.1080/00043125.2025.2480021
ISSN: 0004-3125
2325-5161
Abstract: In this article, the author engages with the concept of "doing hope," moving it beyond the issues of coloniality that often plague peace discourse (Acharya, 2022). Peace is not treated here as a state or product that is complete and static once achieved; rather, it is seen as an ongoing and dynamic process entangled with the nuances of lived experiences. The author foregrounded this exploration in a museum session plan that was created to engage with Issam Kourbaj's (2024a) exhibition Urgent Archives. Through the session, the author investigated how the relational field of the museum, when engaged with embodied forms of inquiry, such as deep listening methods and poetic inquiry, led the participants toward entry points into new and different ways of knowing and doing hope that are both plural and ongoing.
Abstractor: ERIC
Entry Date: 2026
Accession Number: EJ1508101
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0185784132;are01may.25;2025Jun10.03:27;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0185784132-1">Teaching Beyond the Performance of Hope? Museum Education Addressing "Urgent Archives" and Building Nuanced Discourses on Hopeful Futurities </title> <sbt id="AN0185784132-2">Introduction: A Place for the Affective and the Embodied in Museum Learning</sbt> <p>There are only a few millimetres of contact where my feet touch the ground, where they connect with the Earth, we earn this as human beings. I feel my duty as an artist is to translate the world around me, distilling it, this is my responsibility. For visitors visiting the exhibition, if I could have them leave with more questions, I would be successful, not answers but questions. If they can seek for themselves.... [W]hat is it about this life that makes us who we are? (Kourbaj, [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref1">16</reflink>], 35:08)</p> <p>In this article, I engage with the concept of "doing hope," moving it beyond the issues of coloniality that often plague peace discourse (Acharya, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref2">1</reflink>]). Peace is not treated here as a state or product that is complete and static once achieved; rather, it is seen as an ongoing and dynamic process entangled with the nuances of lived experiences. I foregrounded this exploration in a museum session plan that was created to engage with Issam Kourbaj's ([<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref3">15</reflink>]) exhibition Urgent Archives. Through the session, I investigated how the relational field of the museum, when engaged with embodied forms of inquiry, such as deep listening methods and poetic inquiry, led the participants toward entry points into new and different ways of knowing and doing hope that are both plural and ongoing.</p> <p>In Urgent Archives, Kourbaj ([<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref4">15</reflink>]; Figure 1) explored his lived experience and the experiences of others affected by the Syrian conflict, which went down in history as the largest refugee migration. He situated the artwork installations in conversation with Gaza's current and ongoing struggle. These works portrayed the intangibility and tangibility of memory, loss, and archive, wherein ordering and reordering art and materiality reflected the changing self, further complicated by the experience of war and conflict. The curation and archive-building process as an art practice thus became an expression of hope and resistance, as well as a space where nuanced, multifaceted discourse could grow around what it means to "do" hope.</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 1. Issam Kourbaj, Urgent Archives, 2024. Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. Photo courtesy of Jo Underhill.</p> <p>To step into the relational field of the museum and the process of building a museum session plan with intentionality, it is important to understand why there is a need to focus on doing hope. The act of doing hope counters the coloniality embedded in peace discourse as a way of legitimizing colonial conquest (Acharya, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref5">1</reflink>]), and it takes us toward a plural and nuanced understanding of what peace as a process could look like and how it could show up in our ways of making meaning in an increasingly complex world. During the installation period, Kourbaj chatted with museum employees—asking for responses to the curation of the archive, considering their engagement with his curatorial choices as he continued to tinker with the placements of artifacts, poetic works, and installations, which examined the lived experiences of migration and loss. The exhibition became a living and ongoing archive entangled with the past (i.e., the plural lived experiences of those who faced the violence of the Syrian conflict), the present (i.e., the continuation of the violence in Gaza), and the hopeful future, symbolized through the "live" works themselves as they engaged with visitors in affectively rich formats, helping them to question how they understood, experienced, and enacted hope.</p> <p>In the process of developing the museum session plan for school and community groups, I focused on centering emergent spaces of response while engaging with the artworks. Doing so was an effort that mirrored Kourbaj's curatorial process of questioning and realigning to present a nuanced and plural expression of conflict and hope within its context as it is lived, and as it is perceived and engaged with (Figures 2 and 3).</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 2. Issam Kourbaj, Spatial Arrangement of Objects, 2024. Sound works interlacing object installments, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. Photo courtesy of Jo Underhill.</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 3. Issam Kourbaj, Archive of Objects, 2024. Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. Photo courtesy of Jo Underhill.</p> <hd id="AN0185784132-3">Examining Positionality Within the Layered Relational Space of the Museum</hd> <p>I approached creating the museum session plan for Urgent Archives by first acknowledging the positionality with which I stepped into building the learning engagement exercises. This framework centers <emph>response</emph>-ibility[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref6">1</reflink>] shared by museum educators, teachers, and cultural consumers as we engage with ongoing, nuanced, sensitive, emotionally fraught depictions of war and conflict. In the 3 years I have worked as a museum educator, my practice has grown, changed, and moved in tentacular forms[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref7">2</reflink>] (Haraway, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref8">12</reflink>]), which situates my position as a researcher of color and museum educator.[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref9">3</reflink>] Culturally, first, I experienced a notable power shift when I moved from working in the Global South to the Global North. This shift allowed me to better understand how structures of power feed into the way we, as educators, address significant questions of whose story is being told, who is being seen and heard, and how these narratives are bringing up spaces of accountability and inclusion in the museum (Boelhower, [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref10">5</reflink>]).</p> <p>In this article, I explore the idea of accountability by looking for plurality over inclusion to avoid the inherent colonial power dynamics of inclusion, which further question <emph>who</emph> decides <emph>whom</emph> gets to be included. Plurality, with its decolonial turn, allows for multiple narratives to exist simultaneously (Stenmark, [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref11">26</reflink>]). Building on this position was the intellectual move I made to working in academic research and within academia, when previously I had been a creative practitioner working in museum education. As an academic, the close ties with the formality of the institution brought me face-to-face with how knowledge models are built on the tangibility of what is observed and recorded as holding greater veracity.</p> <p>When we try to understand the experiences of hope, doing and engaging with it as a process that is affective, a/live, and one that must be constantly enacted, we move toward the idea of hopeful futurities (Demos, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref12">9</reflink>]), which are central to living pedagogies of peace that are felt and held within bodies. Demos's ([<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref13">9</reflink>]) concept of hopeful futurity engages speculative imagination with the material practice of living to explore "the rift zones between destructive and wholly unjust if not quite outmoded ways of organizing existence" (p. 2). Working with these "rift zones" allows plural lived experiences to become central to "doing," enacting, and engaging with hope. The rift zones are deeply relational spaces, intersectional, and entangled with human and more-than-human elements (Haraway, [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref14">12</reflink>]), and they are fraught with affective emergences leading to <emph>new materialities</emph>,[<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref15">4</reflink>] or new ways of knowing. This process of <emph>re-mattering</emph> (Barad, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref16">3</reflink>]) is explored in this article as occurring in the museum space, emergent out of the museum session plan that foregrounds multisensorial and embodied forms of engaging with material culture. It attempts to experience the museum, the exhibition, and the artworks as live and living "rift zones" (Demos, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref17">9</reflink>], p. 2) from and through which we can have nuanced experiences and understanding of hope.</p> <hd id="AN0185784132-4">Literature Review: Listening for Affective Emergences</hd> <p>The "affective" includes more than the emotion-based feelings definition (Cvetkovich, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref18">6</reflink>]; Mũnoz, 2000; Ngai, [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref19">21</reflink>]) traditionally associated with it. The definition I use here does not deny the significance of emotions in learning spaces, but I include a layered understanding of what emotions are doing in the affective domain based on the vocabulary other scholars have used to describe affect itself, which includes defining it as a living, shivering force (Seigworth & Gregg, [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref20">25</reflink>]) that moves through interrelating and intrarelating experiences of life; a charge (Stewart, [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref21">27</reflink>]); a flow (Manning, [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref22">17</reflink>]); an intensity (Deleuze, [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref23">7</reflink>]; Deleuze & Guattari, [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref24">8</reflink>]; Massumi, [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref25">18</reflink>]); and a vibration (Henriques, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref26">13</reflink>]). Affect can be understood as a tangible force moving in, with, or through bodies and impacting them in a variety of ways. The points of collision or affective rift zones (Demos, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref27">9</reflink>]) become opportunities for building new materialities, or new ways of knowing and doing hope. The encounter with the affective leads to emergent openings to other social bodies, temporalities, and spaces that extend "into us and register in diverse, multisensory, and multitemporal ways" (Dernikos et al., [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref28">11</reflink>], p. 7), allowing us to think of collaborative, co-storied futures (Niccolini et al., [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref29">22</reflink>]).</p> <p>Urgent Archives is an exhibition made up of sound installations, text-based artworks, performance works, and material installations. The exhibition itself was in motion, consistently being pulled apart and put back together (as living materiality). An assemblage that morphed through "flows, folds, and patterns" (Nail, [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref30">20</reflink>], p. 179), building difference as a process in motion. There is potential in this process because of its affective resonance, which is felt before it is codified through language (Dernikos, [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref31">10</reflink>]); it is in those spaces where it is experienced as a force within the body that we can move toward building new ways of engaging hope that allow for plural living cultures.</p> <p>Exploring hopeful futurities (Demos, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref32">9</reflink>]) requires us to approach the idea of hope as also one in motion; the museum space can be one of hope and dignity because it is a/live, "a space for dialogue... exchange... [for] voices to be heard" (Wright, [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref33">28</reflink>], p. 211). However, the definition of hope as a concept needs to be complicated for its nuances to be "heard" and to keep it from the colonial trap of peace—whose dialogue gets spoken; who gets to participate in the exchange; whose voices are heard, unheard, or worse, silenced; and how are the yet unheard listened for? We, as the audience and museum educators leading sessions, must be alert through this listening process, addressing the concern with the affective and its ability to perpetuate and hold in place particular racialized bodies within systems of oppression (Ahmed, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref34">2</reflink>]). Developing a methodology founded in deep, responsive, embodied forms of listening allows for pluralized possibilities to arise when mediating affective responses of hope through social, cultural, and political inequalities (Juvonen & Kolehmainen, [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref35">14</reflink>]). Doing so moves us toward Demos's ([<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref36">9</reflink>]) "hopeful futurities" (p. 2)—a pluralized and decolonial understanding of hope as being in motion.</p> <hd id="AN0185784132-5">Deep Listening as a Pedagogy</hd> <p>Deep listening, a concept developed by Pauline Oliveros ([<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref37">23</reflink>]), explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious act of listening; it cultivates a heightened awareness of the internal and external sonic environments. She wrote, "As you listen, the particles of sound decide to be heard. Listening affects what is sounding. It is a symbiotic relationship. As you listen, the environment is enlivened. This is the listening effect" (p. 9). The veracity of the visual often outweighs the sensorial output from other senses, and yet when we focus on sound and what is heard and unheard, we can examine our agency in the stimuli we take in. In noticing what we choose to hear and what we choose to silence, the individual can transform the hearing field into a listening field by the choices they make when integrating meaning into the sonic environment. The sonic field can become deeply relational and fraught with rift zones and possibilities.</p> <p>In the museum session plan for Urgent Archives, the sonic field thus became rich with promise in terms of how a person can approach the concept of hope. Building the session plan, I treated the affective responses of participants (held within fleshy bodies) to the exhibition artifacts as "rift zones," which allowed explorations of hope as a tangible state of doing/enacting—wherein it was not about the discourse of hope but rather the enactment of it. The body is where the affective is enacted, and it holds the potential of "diverse approaches to a hopeful futurity" (Demos, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref38">9</reflink>], p. 1). We (the museum session leader and my participants) acknowledged as we proceeded that the pluralized world of lived experiences within which hope was being contextualized was made of many worlds that had ended and birthed continuously and cyclically (Demos, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref39">9</reflink>]), leaving us to examine the affective violence of colonial, White-patriarchal, and neocolonial systems of knowing. And, as we moved forward, we did so by attempting and thinking about how to represent the "radical potentiality of the not-yet" (Demos, [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref40">9</reflink>], p. 1).</p> <hd id="AN0185784132-6">Setting the Stage: Building a Museum Session Plan</hd> <p>The exhibition was in conversation with the conflict in Gaza and its depiction in the media while also engaging with the student encampment half a kilometer away at King's College, University of Cambridge. The Kettle's Yard learning team developed the session plan focused on (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref41">1</reflink>) engaging with impressions made by the artworks and (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref42">2</reflink>) exploring emerging narratives within the museum and outside of it, and how they resonated with experiences of hope, conflict, grief, and challenge. However, adopting call-and-response questions as prompts, such as "Is there anything hopeful within this work?" or "Would you say this is a difficult/challenging work?" restricted a deeper engagement with the material/immaterial archive, and the questions also intellectualized the idea of hope rather than encouraging tangible engagement with its experience. As a result, the session produced closed responses, single-word answers, and minimum engagement among secondary school students, sixth-form students, and younger students.</p> <p>To build on the museum session plan, I worked with a group of seven participants, all university students from diverse backgrounds—art history, education, museum studies, music, and climate conservation. When a similar questioning format was adopted for the university student group, they gave similar feedback despite the sophistication of their knowledge base. I would argue that this was predominantly because the live and layered space of the exhibition was not being engaged with, and the closed format of questioning could have benefited from an embodied, affective engagement that held space for a material-discursive practice of doing theory.</p> <p>To address this, I began the session in the research space of the gallery, which was a floor above the two gallery exhibition rooms. This space held Kourbaj's video interviews, diaries, sketches, and notes, providing insight into the life and art that birthed the exhibition. It included the journey of how his curatorial ideas developed and entangled with his lived experience; his poetry in Arabic and English, which is the conceptual heart of the installations; and his account of artmaking and meaning-making amid conflict. I began the session with the performance of a poem,[<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref43">5</reflink>] "dear listener," which was written in response to the exhibition and Kourbaj's interview. This was to ground the session in the act of listening as a deeply embodied form of engagement, working with the sounds of the art and artifacts in the exhibition, the exhibition space itself, and paying attention to our awareness of how what we hear drives our engagement with the material culture on display. This mode of embodied engagement foregrounds the sensorial and removes the layer of separation (often found in museum and gallery spaces) from the works of art and the experiences depicted.</p> <p>The first set of instructions for deep listening as a practice were given to the participants before the performance of the poem "dear listener."[<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref44">6</reflink>]</p> <p>These instructions for listening encouraged the participants to pay attention to the physical responses that emerged within their bodies as they moved through the artifacts and installations and encouraged an awareness of the multisensorial field of the museum, building the first layer of listening to the sounds around them. The second layer of listening asked participants to pay attention to the affective resonances that emerged in their bodies as they listened to the sound and video works. The third layer of this listening process asked participants to explore how they were approaching the act of listening to the visual and textual artifacts. A central provocation that emerged from the offset of this process was to think about how our own lived experience was entangled with those lived experiences that were completely foreign to us. What can emerge from the collision of the two within the listening field and can that allow us to experience, engage with, and do hope in different ways for the nuances of plurality to emerge?</p> <p>With these instructions in place, I moved on to the performance of the poem "dear listener,"[<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref45">7</reflink>] which is a creative prompt that would act as an entry point into the museum session plan.</p> <p>The poem explores the experiences of migrating refugee populations, the disruption of war and conflict in the lives of people living with it—stories we choose to hear, silence, embrace, and discard—and what we let in and leave out. Consuming the exhibition experience, we as the audience were both within it and othered from it.</p> <p>Could an affective-embodied orientation as an introduction to the exhibition help build a discourse on hope, exploring how we hold it in our bodies and how we share its burden with others across race, culture, community, and more?</p> <p>Participants were handed three small notebooks and pens. The notebooks were to be circulated among the group during the session and were a place for them to jot down responses that emerged. The nature of notation was left to the participants; they could use words, drawings, doodles, poetry, and so on, and these materialities (Barad & Gandorfer, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref46">4</reflink>]) would be brought into the discursive space at the end of the session. The circulating notebooks had two purposes. First, it was a space where they could co–theorize and collaborate, co-storytell, and co–knowledge build (Niccolini et al., [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref47">22</reflink>]). Participants could respond to other participants' responses alongside their own responses to the exhibition. The second purpose was to provide a tangible touchstone with which to engage as participants moved through the multisensorial space of the exhibition without a tactile engagement. This became another grounding technique to keep the awareness of the body and its affective systems at the forefront of the inquiry mode (Figure 4).</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 4. Urgent Archive, 2024, Kettle's Yard. Photo courtesy of Jo Underhill.</p> <p>Participants were given 30 to 35 minutes to explore each of the two galleries on the lower level. They were left to explore on their own or as a group. The notebooks were circulated between them for recording responses. At the end of the session's exploratory section, we gathered to discuss the emergent responses and the process of moving/learning/engaging and producing new materialities within the relational museum space.</p> <hd id="AN0185784132-7">Discussion: Emergent Responses From the Museum Session</hd> <p>As a group, we examined emergent responses within the museum space. We explored alternative ways of moving through the exhibition that allowed for hope to be engaged with as an ongoing and live process. The responses led to questions, new openings, and new materialities that arose from the exhibition space. We explored this through some of the participants' responses. What does the enactment of hope as dialogue, hope as a practice of engaging, look like to understand it rather than perform it?</p> <p>One participant's affective response (Figure 5) to the intermingling, merging works of sound, visual, and performance installations as they collided through each other and through the act of meaning-making considers how humans live within entangled histories that impact and impinge the present, the future, and each other. Our ways of knowing arise from this entangled relational space, demonstrating how we pick and choose to listen for what is heard, silencing and cutting through other forms of sounds and storied narratives as an act of agency. This agency, however, is malleable. As we listen, the loudest sounds (and perhaps ideas) often impact with greater force, leaving impressions or marks on bodies (Barad, [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref48">3</reflink>]). This is elaborated on in the response in Figure 5. It questioned how we make those agential cuts of meaning/choosing what we listen for or the meaning we accord it: "I am watching a video which reads as 'leave to remain' but the loudest sound I hear is the noise of the making of art (from the other video)—this cuts through it all" (Figure 7).</p> <p>Responding to this, another participant brought our attention to the layered and entangled movement of the viewers within/through the exhibition (Figure 6), shaping our process of making meaning, by stating, "Everything is swirling around me—how do we ascribe meaning? (I looked up and everyone was gone) (when did you decide to go) (I left too)."</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 5. Participant response on the entangled nature of the relational space. Photo courtesy of the author.</p> <p>As the audience (participants) move through circles that widen and close around them, enmeshed with human, more-than-human, and nonhuman bodies, they know and learn to understand and make meaning within/through these relational and entangled spaces. Exploring this process—the process of evoking hope—a participant added this to the collected responses in the discussion:</p> <p>I'm wondering, in exhibitions like this, where it's not, you know, the term that I recently came across was past continuous, where history is not something that is ossified. And that can be put in a machine, but it is continuing to govern and shape your relationship with not just the world but yourself along the way. You are entitled to it, but how do you navigate something complex like this? Because I think the fact that <emph>you</emph> (session leader) let us take it in at our own pace and build our own kind of relationality with all sorts of things that are there, is so powerful and important. How does one do this, I'm thinking if this has to have a certain sort of rhythmic disjuncture between the ways in which bodies and minds will absorb and move through these spaces? Because these works are not artefacts or objects, they are real conversations.</p> <p>These conversations, which are occurring within and outside the walls of the museum, are pulsating with materiality, pointing to experiences of the layered plurality of the world around us working as a symphony of impinging sounds (Figures 5 and 6). The idea of introducing a rhythmic disjuncture as bodies and minds move through these spaces allowed us to play with the tension of the rift zones that arise through engagement with the exhibition, experiencing a deep resonating plurality now held in the body. The process of self/collective interrogation and questioning that occurred there became "inextricable from questions of (in)justice(s)" (Barad & Gandorfer, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref49">4</reflink>], p. 14), which came through in the nuances of participant responses, indicating the complexity of the experience of achieving hope and building hopeful futurities. These are the new materialities emerging from the stickiness of affect as it encroaches on and permeates the process of engagement (Dernikos et al., [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref50">11</reflink>]).</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 6. Participant response on the points of agential cuts. Photo courtesy of the author.</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 7. Issam Kourbaj, Leave to Remain, 2024. Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. Photo courtesy of Jo Underhill.</p> <p>Another response from a participant explored the sensation of separateness and othering. The viewer is the outsider to the inner world and experiences of the artist, witnessed but never shared or intimately experienced. The challenge to engage truly with this closely and the sense of failure when this does not happen were expressed:</p> <p>Across the room, while I can hear the artist, I feel very acutely an outsider to the artist's life. I am seeing broken snippets of his life, along with so many others, but I don't feel I hear his voice—though his voice floats behind me.</p> <p>The participant clarified the inability to hear the artist's voice, even though it floated around, as the othering/separateness that felt like a sense of failure to engage even while one is engaging. It was only in accepting witnessing as both an act of listening and a presencing that the distance felt reduced.</p> <p>When giving the introduction to the exhibition, I relayed to the participants how I had watched students and visitors move through the exhibition, capturing images on their phones and selfies with these complex artworks, feverishly reading all the texts available, every piece of poetry played over the speakers heard and recorded—taking it apart and reasoning through its abstraction in a cerebral manner. I remarked,</p> <p>It reminds me of <emph>Spirited Away</emph>, the way Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse, consumes to satisfy a never-satiated hunger for more, the enviable work ethic of the people in the house progressing, but blind to themselves, their identities, and their bodies—this blindness represented by the loss of the Kanji[<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref51">8</reflink>] that is their name. Is our need for consumption so great that it drives our acts of meaning-making and keeps us from listening to and for the world?</p> <p>Who are we listening to, and why and how are we listening to them or consuming these experiences of lived realities even when they are different from ours? A participant responded to this provocation by stating: Listening to the loss of other lives? Why am I <emph>listening</emph>? Is listening a symbol of my passivity? Or is it an act of resistance? (See Figures 8 and 9.)</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 8. Participant response on "consumption" within the museum. Photo courtesy of the author.</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 9. Participant response on Listening as Resistance. Photo courtesy of the author.</p> <p>Engaging with and through such questions foregrounded (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref52">1</reflink>) what I am listening for, (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref53">2</reflink>) why, and (<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref54">3</reflink>) for whom; these questions around participants' own accountability in the practice of listening, engaging, and even witnessing paved the path of understanding the process of doing hope. As in the response above, the participant began to question if the very act of listening was passive or a form of resistance, perhaps even an act of reparation. In discussions, they pressed on how this placed them as witnesses presencing lived narratives, holding space for what spills over when the experience enacts on the visitor in tangible and affect-oriented ways. The notebooks became significant as touchstones for transferred tactility, as notation spaces for these witness accounts and as an archive of live and ongoing responses, communal yet personal, connected and equally independent.</p> <hd id="AN0185784132-8">Conclusion</hd> <p>In centering listening as an embodied and affective methodology of building the museum session plan, the participants and I explored the significance of staying with the tension and the discomfort of the unfamiliar and plural lived experiences and their potential to examine how we consume and experience hope. Engaging with hope as a decolonial process is to open ourselves to what is emergent and what impinges and sticks to the affective systems of the body—physical/emotional/intellectual—and affect as a force that moves through the spaces around us. Using listening as a methodology opens spaces for emergent responses to be fleshed out of rift zones of tension and acts as an entry point into nuanced discussions around the process of doing hope. When exploring hope as an action rather than a product, we can build entry points guiding toward tension nodes of difference that lead to building hopeful futurities. Doing so considers the relationality of the participants' lived experiences as they engaged in the museum session, interacted, and drew connections with and between material artifacts and abstract ideas to build tangible realities. In building such a praxis framework that guides rather than demands responses, hope can move beyond an abstract performative act to one that is tangible, malleable, ongoing, and live.</p> <hd id="AN0185784132-9">Author Note</hd> <p>This study was done according to the British Educational Research Association guidelines, and consent forms were obtained for all participants discussed.</p> <ref id="AN0185784132-10"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref2" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Acharya, A. (2022). Race and racism in the founding of the modern world order. International Affairs, 98 (1), 23 – 43. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab198</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref7" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref9" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref15" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Barad, K., & Gandorfer, D. (2021). Political desirings: Yearnings for mattering (,) differently. Theory & Event, 24 (1), 14 – 66. https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2021.0002</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref10" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Boelhower, W. (2024). Decolonization, diversity, and accountability: The role of museums in democracies of the Global North. Atlantic Studies, 21 (1), 14 – 29. https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2023.2235194</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref18" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A public feeling. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391852</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref23" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. 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Kettle's Yard Museum and Gallery, Cambridge, United Kingdom.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Massumi, B. (1987). Translator's foreword: Pleasures of philosophy. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari (Eds.), A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (pp. ix – xv). University of Minnesota Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Muñoz, J. E. (2000). Feeling brown: Ethnicity and affect in Ricardo Bracho's "The sweetest hangover (and other STDs)." Theatre Journal, 52 (1), 67 – 79. <ulink href="http://www.jstor.com/stable/25068741">http://www.jstor.com/stable/25068741</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nail, T. (2021). Kinaesthetics: From assemblages to fields of circulation. In P. de Assis & P. Giudici (Eds.), Machinic assemblages of desire: Deleuze and artistic research (pp. 179 – 196). Leuven University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ngai, S. (2005). 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Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3974-1_15</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <ref id="AN0185784132-11"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibtext> Being cognizant of how we respond and are responsible for and from our positions of power when driving modes of learning is integral to the process of building <emph>new</emph> materialities (Barad, [3]) or new ways of being, doing, and thinking.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> I borrow the word from Haraway ([12]), who builds on the Latin <emph>tentaculum</emph>, meaning "feeler," from the root of <emph>tentare</emph>, meaning "to feel" or "to try," namely to foreground experience and living as a mode of learning and building knowledge models.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> I am a member of the learning team at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, responsible for planning educational museum visits for school and community groups, usually having to distill challenging ideas and exhibitions into 90-minute museum sessions.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Matter makes the building blocks of our ways of knowing and can be assembled and reassembled differently (Barad, [3]).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Research poetry is a specific form of poetry used in arts-based research that "synthesize[s] experiences in a direct and affective way" (Prendergast, [24], p. 545).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Find the instructions at this audio link: (Audio link 1) https://soundcloud.com/user-13841562/listening-instructions-museum-session?si=4582ec0d19f0455e8ef1c675d79cfa0a&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Poetry reading available here: https://soundcloud.com/user-13841562/dear-listener?si=ac5533b70ae94094b385599d33a2841d&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> The kanji, which are characters that make up a name, in this case symbolize the representation of deep entangled histories passed through family and cultural roots.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Girinandini Singh</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> <p></p> <p>Girinandini Singh, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge in Cambridge, UK.</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref8"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref26"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref29"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref30"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref31"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref33"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref35"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref37"></nolink>
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  Data: In this article, the author engages with the concept of "doing hope," moving it beyond the issues of coloniality that often plague peace discourse (Acharya, 2022). Peace is not treated here as a state or product that is complete and static once achieved; rather, it is seen as an ongoing and dynamic process entangled with the nuances of lived experiences. The author foregrounded this exploration in a museum session plan that was created to engage with Issam Kourbaj's (2024a) exhibition Urgent Archives. Through the session, the author investigated how the relational field of the museum, when engaged with embodied forms of inquiry, such as deep listening methods and poetic inquiry, led the participants toward entry points into new and different ways of knowing and doing hope that are both plural and ongoing.
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