I just completed this draft essay / book chapter (below, and via PDF download), which explores our obligations as global citizens and museum practitioners at a moment of extraordinary change—an Age of Consequences and cultural revolution.

I’ve been wrestling these ideas to the ground for almost a year now, since preparing for a talk I gave at the 2025 Children in Museums conference in Liverpool (hence the “Liverpool Thesis”), and this my most thorough and detailed effort so far, with a long bibliography and a long-long list of citations.

Note that this is my un-edited, Author’s Original Manuscript (AOM) for a chapter in a book to be published in 2027 by IKTF, the Institute for Cultural Participation Research / Instituts für kulturelle Teilhabeforschung and Transcript Verlag, Germany. The book is an anthology from the 2025 “Children in Museums” Connected Audience conference in Liverpool, England, with a working title of Culture & Young People – What Could Possibly Go Wrong? The anthology will be edited by Vera Allmanritter and Julia Glesner.

Introduction

At the 2023 opening gala for the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai (MuSo) I approached a middle-aged guest and asked how he was enjoying the evening.

“I am angry,” he told me. “This museum is a jewel, but where were you 30 years ago when I was a child? And where are you now in the thousands of other places where a museum like this is needed?”

I was surprised and inspired by his response. Surprised, because few people expect a children’s museum to have such significance; and inspired because I felt he had perfectly sensed our purpose and ambitions and he felt they were too small. And I agree with his assessment: indeed, where are we — our sector, broadly writ, of children’s museums and all museums at a moment of extraordinary human and planetary change? Why build a children’s museum in Mumbai at all, or any museum in a world beset by social, technological, and environmental challenges?

Museums evolve in response changes in society. In the 1820s, visitors to the British Museum underwent rigorous personal vetting by the Director before earning a quick, supervised visit to the collection (Bryson 2025). Two centuries later, the British Museum has a different entry scheme and a different role in the world. But if the purpose and methods of the museum have always been fluid, the question now is whether we can get museum practice and practitioners to change quickly enough to meet a moment of breathtaking biological and socio-technical rupture.

This essay lays out a five-point thesis regarding our current moment in human culture and planetary systems, exploring our obligations as global citizens and museum practitioners, particularly within the discipline of children’s museums:

We are in the middle of anew kind of cultural revolution — an “Age of Consequences” where the compounding effects of choices made across social, technological, and natural systems are becoming the predominant driver of human events.
This revolution and rupture is unfolding everywhere, but it is most acutely seen and addressed in megacities and on the “Global Street.”
Third, within this landscape, young people must be recognized and supported as consequential civic actors with unique rights, stature, and capabilities. This conceptualization of youth is growing globally, and is linked to the “rights of nature” and the “rights of future generations.”
Legacy cultural institutions are structurally “deranged”— hamstrung by twentieth-century habits that leave them ill-equipped to act as authentic allies to youth or relate to the hyper-velocity of rupture beyond their doors.
Museums, libraries, and knowledge/memory institutions must transform themselves into “places of appearance” that constitute the human process of natality (societal rebirth), acting as sites of imagination and renewal where new generations can manifest their agency through speech, presence, and action.

The acceleration of change and the perceived closing off of promising futures have cast new light on rights and capabilities of young people. While the Museum of Solutions (MuSo) in Mumbai was my first direct leadership role in a children’s museum, the experience solidified my belief that this sub-discipline deserves greater visibility and higher stakes. I believe museums, libraries, and other cultural, scientific, and performing arts organizations must now view themselves as essential components of a global response to the Age of Consequences and the project of building a more just, sustainable, and joyous world, with particular attention to the rights and capabilities of young people.

I write this essay not as an academic but as a cultural practitioner, maker, and doer. This perspective is informed by a career dedicated to increasing the openness and democratic vibrancy of cultural institutions and advancing the right to culture, as framed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes the right to access and contribute to the cultural and scientific life of the community (United Nations General Assembly 1948). This right is more than symbolic: it is at the heart of our capacity to understand the world we are living in and to make good decisions regarding its future.

1. The Age of Consequences

The “I am angry” comment from MuSo’s gala is part of a wider public sentiment: a pervasive unease about the coming decades, mixed with a growing regret among older people that they have left the world in worse shape than they found it. But what, exactly, is driving these feelings? What are we up against?

I believe that we are in the middle of an Age of Consequences—a cultural revolution driving a wedge between young people and a joyous, sustainable future. This epoch is marked by deep structural ruptures: a collapse of shared truth, systemic attacks on knowledge institutions, the marketization of discourse via global platforms (Zuboff 2019; Harari 2024), and extreme concentrations of wealth that erode democratic systems (Chancel et al. 2026). As former UN Under-Secretary Michael Møller remarked, “We are at a time of history where the structures, both the UN in itself and also governance structures generally across the world, are struggling. We have systems that are no longer as relevant and as impactful and as ready to take on the problems of today” (Edson 2026a).

These ruptures are more than the superficial artifacts of politics and media culture; they are the consequences of an unprecedented convergence of worldwide and planetary phenomena that transcend the politics or media environments of any one culture, and we dismiss their scope and severity at our peril.

The term Age of Consequences originated in a 2007 strategic analysis for the US Department of Defense predicting that the delayed effects of climate change would soon become the predominant driver of global affairs. For example, the report predicted that even what was then the lowest “expected” scenario of global warming (1.3° C, 0.23 meters sea level rise) would trigger heightened cross-border tensions from large-scale migrations, systemic water and agricultural scarcity in developing states, and the coastal flooding of global mega-deltas (Campbell et al. 2007).

Today, there is a growing sense that the predicted global consequences are no longer in the future—they are arriving now. Naomi Klein recently remarked: “...There is a consciousness that we are in what was once called ‘the age of consequences.’ The forecast existential global crises are now hitting. It’s not just that this may happen, but rather: This is happening.” (Klein and McCordick 2026)

I add to this analysis a further conclusion. Building on the work of the scholars, scientists, and public intellectuals cited in this paper, I believe it is clear that the climate emergency and the destruction of biodiversity (which E.O. Wilson [2010] calls “the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us”) are converging with unprecedented developments in areas such as bioengineering, AI, computer science, advanced physics, and extreme concentrations of wealth and power to create a new magnitude of Consequences and ruptures beyond what was imagined by Campbell et al in 2007.

Individually, these drivers are unprecedented. For example, Bill McKibben (2011, 2017) notes that the speed and system dynamics of climate change (e.g. tipping points delayed effects at planetary scale) make it fundamentally different from past political challenges. Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel (2022) note that bioengineering will lead to the creation of new trees of life and Harari (2024) notes that AI is creating new forms of consciousness.

But collectively these drivers converge and amplify one another to a new threshold and speed of consequences. Breakthroughs across information technology, nanotechnology, advanced physics, and cognitive science are accelerating one another in a process called NBIC convergence (Roco and Bainbridge 2003) [1] creating astonishing breakthroughs and unexpected societal consequences from the mobile phone to mRNA vaccines (Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution 2024; OECD 2023 ).

The belief that “innovation” will be able to fix these disruptions or keep them in check is a dangerous illusion. For example, as E.O. Wilson warned, “To move ahead as though scientific and entrepreneurial genius will solve each crisis that arises implies that the declining biosphere can be similarly manipulated. But the world is too complicated to be turned into a garden. There is no biological homeostat that can be worked by humanity; to believe otherwise is to risk reducing a large part of Earth to a wasteland” (Wilson 2021).

2. Megacities, Expulsion, and the Global Street

The challenge of youth, institutions, and agency in the Age of Consequences puts sharp focus on Earth’s 40-plus megacities (urban areas of more than 10 million people). It is here, in these places, with names like Paris, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro that our collective future may be won or lost.

Megacities are fantastic wellsprings of creativity and innovation as well as the cause of profound social and environmental challenges. Mumbai embodies this paradox: a teeming coastal city renowned for economic opportunity, Mumbai is known as “The City of Dreams”— it is home to Bollywood, India’s financial capital, and an estimated 22 million people including 92 billionaires and 11 million people who live in informal settlements or slums (Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India 2011; Deccan Chronicle 2026; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2019).

The challenges of Mumbai and other megacities mirror the challenges of humans on Earth — and it is here that our human future may be won or lost. By midcentury, two out of every three humans will live in urban areas, and the IPCC has noted that megacities concentrate and multiply complex social, technological, and natural crises in ways that are, like MBIC convergence, difficult to diagnose, solve, or even comprehend (Grant et al. 2017; Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (Ipcc) 2023).

By 2070, Mumbai will face severe, recurring coastal flooding due to rising sea levels (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2019; Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (Ipcc) 2023). Yet during my time in the city, the topic of sea level rise was absent from civic discourse. One reason is the lack of accessible platforms for public sense-making. Legacy civic institutions are typically designed for stability, not speed and innovation, leaving them ill-equipped to keep pace with fast-paced social, technical, and environmental change (Hannan and Freeman 1984).

So where might so-called “ordinary” people go to educate themselves and develop their agency together?

The Global Street and Explusion

Saskia Sassen, a pioneering scholar of cities and globalization, asserts that when formal institutions become inaccessible, the “Global Street” of the “Global City” becomes the primary arena where disenfranchised people can establish their presence. Sassen argues that large-scale macroeconomic phenomena such as globalization aren’t just abstractions in economic textbooks; they happen to real people in real places as the practical, day-to-day realities of The Global Street (Sassen 2011).

We can build on Sassen’s insight: The Global Street helps us make a connection between the overwhelming scale and complexity of the Age of Consequences — so big it seems abstract and impossible to act upon; the everyday lives of real people in real places; and the need for a cultural infrastructure of places of sense making and action taking.

However, the Global Street is also the site of what Sassen calls “expulsion”—a process by which powerful interests evict the vulnerable from the public square, treating them as secondary to the so-called “logic” of the market (Sassen 2014).

The process of expulsion bears some responsibility for the relative absence of platforms for dialogue and activism. It is not just that people are overwhelmed or disinterested: large numbers of people are actually discouraged or prevented from appearing on the Global Street.

Decades of corporate disinformation has been explicitly designed to dismantle public sense-making around climate and the environment (U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget & U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability 2024); lawsuits have been weaponized by extraction industries (oil, gas, mining, etc.) to bankrupt grassroots dissent (EarthRights International 2022); and nation states are increasingly criminalizing peaceful environmental protest (Reliefweb 2023).

On the Global Street the message to young people is clear: you are not welcome in the places where your future will be decided. The adult world has little regard for what it sees as unproductive vulnerability of youth.

3. Young People as Consequential Civic Actors

Young people are forcefully expressing their astonishment and outrage at the Age of Consequences, their expulsion from the Global Street, and the dishonesty and ineptitude of adults. Their furor, and a rising legal and policy recognition of their rights, signals a worldwide shift in the way we think of childhood and the kinds of institutions we build for the youth.

Examples of young people’s outrage abound, and their words are worth repeating and remembering as they remind us of the moral imperatives, betrayal, and profound stakes involved. In 2019, sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg confronted world leaders at the United Nations, stating: “Your generation is failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you” (Thunberg 2021). In 2018, activist Lizia Woolf challenged the idea of soft, incremental approaches to the climate emergency during an exchange with journalist George Monbiot, asking: “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction... What is it you want me to feel?” (Monbiot 2018).

A New Way of Understanding Childhood

As young people face the dual burden of a rupturing, uncertain world and the void of adult responsibility, we are witnessing the emergence of a new way of understanding childhood and youth. The features of this new paradigm are:

a) recognition of the fundamental right of young people to participate in the shaping of the world that they will inherit;

b) recognizing young people as consequential civic actors with unique capabilities and agency in the present moment;

c) the need to establish these rights and capabilities in law, along with the “rights of nature” and the rights of youth and future generations to inherit a healthy, sustainable environment.

A progression of landmark legal decisions and frameworks from the United Nations are evidence that this new paradigm is emerging. For example, the UN Pact for the Future explicitly “flips the script” on legacy human rights and international development narratives that treated young people as no more than “future torchbearers.” Instead, the Pact states that achieving a sustainable future is “mathematically impossible” without youth-led action, and it codifies the role of youth as essential stakeholders and active partners who must be given rights, agency and “a seat at the table” now. (United Nations General Assembly 2024).

The Pact is buttressed by the UN Declaration of Future Generations and the the UNICEF Guidelines on Adolescent Participation and Civic Engagement, which introduce intergenerational justice as a formal mandate and establish that youth carry a distinct moral authority to judge and reform current institutional failures because young people are “the ones who will inherit this planet” and thus experience the consequences of intergenerational “inequality and injustice” (UNICEF 2020; United Nations 2024). Furthermore, in statements that directly echo Sassen’s construct of the Global Street and Hannah Arendt’s concepts of Natality and Places of Appearance (which are explored below, the UNICEF Guidelines assert that when legacy systems close off civic spaces to youth, they isolate young people and actively deprive the society of the of their “essential” leadership, insights, and their capacity for collective renewal.

This paradigm change toward youth rights and the rights of future generations is actively reshaping environmental law, including advancing the legal foundations of the “rights of nature” and the rights of future generations. Nations such as Ecuador, Bolivia, New Zealand, Germany, South Korea, and France have established landmark law and constitutional frameworks that establish the rights of nature and natural features such as rivers and mountains as sovereign entities with their own legal standing (Neubauer v. Germany 2021; Bellina 2024; Baek and Ahn 2025; Sherpa 2026), and in 2025, the International Court of Justice formally codified intergenerational justice into international law—a case initiated by twenty-seven outraged law students at the University of the South Pacific in Vanuatu. (The law students who struck a seismic blow for climate justice 2025; “Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change” 2026).

I conjecture that adoption of legal and policy frameworks for the rights and agency of young people and future generations will accelerate in the coming years, and public recognition for these rights and capabilities will continue to grow and become part of mainstream opinion. The scope of the protections rights we wish to recognize will continue to grow as well. Just as European courts have begun enforcing a corporate “duty of vigilance” to prevent systemic ecological damage (Sherpa 2026), the legal tools being forged today will inevitably be expanded to defend young people and future generations against the unmediated impacts of Age of Consequences drivers such as advanced bioengineering, sovereign algorithmic surveillance, and the corporate enclosure of our shared biophysical and epistemic systems.

Cultural organizations would be wise to notice these developments. Our prevailing, modern concept of childhood emerged as a reaction against the exploitation of children in the industrial revolution and machine age; it is barely a century old (Zelizer 1994). A new conception of childhood seems to be emerging as a reaction against the diminishment of young people’s futures in the Age of Consequences. These profound changes in the legal and policy environment for youth and future generations reflect the peril that young people face and our recognition that they deserve new status, protections, and institutions if they, and we all, are to enjoy thriving futures. This should be a wake-up call to cultural organizations signaling that this new conception of young people reflects the world that young people are actually living in, and that this paradigm is here to stay and will ultimately predominate.

4. Derangement and Institutional Inertia

Establishing legal rights for nature and future generations will require decades-long, “intergenerational” persistence (May 2024). But why must institutional change take so long? And what does this tell us about the strategic posture of the cultural sector and other institutions as the Age of Consequences arrives at their doors?

Like the legal profession, memory and knowledge organizations prioritize continuity, institutional control, and traditional authority over rapid responsiveness. As strategist Peter Schwartz wryly told me during the development of the Smithsonian Institution’s 2010–2015 strategic plan: “Museums, like universities, are organized on the model of ‘enduring wisdom’; they don’t have to change quickly because wisdom endures.”

But we no longer live in an era where the luxury of geological time, or even 20th century organizational time, is granted to our institutions. “Everything in this gallery is 40 years out of date,” a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History told me, standing amid the museum’s geology and fossil exhibitions in 2012. “We are depriving generations of visitors the truth about the natural world because we can’t make exhibitions fast enough to keep up with the current speed of science.”

This speed gap is not merely a symptom of bureaucratic lag; it is a direct collision with the realities of the Age of Consequences in planetary physics (e.g., atmospheric carbon, ocean acidification) and accelerating technologies. While our institutions are mostly organized for predictable, linear change, the Age of Consequences is defined by the dynamics of “systems” and exponential change. As Earth system scientist Will Steffen famously remarked at the launch of the Great Acceleration dashboard, we have broken completely away from the stable, 12,000-year Holocene baseline to enter an “unknown future state.” Steffen warned:

“It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime, humanity has become a planetary-scale geological force.” (Steffen et al. 2015)

Or as Bill McKibben wrote in a Rolling Stone article, piercingly titled Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing: “If we don’t win very quickly on climate change then we will never win” (McKibben 2017).

As a result of these new scales of acceleration, our bedrock systems of public sense-making—including museums, libraries, education, the law, and much of civil society—are creating less and less civic value as the Age of Consequences accelerates.

Deranged Institutions

Ultimately, I contend that our cultural-sector institutions suffer from a profound condition of “derangement.” This term, developed for a critique of literature, culture, and institutional norms by the writer Amitav Ghosh, suggests that our current professional and cultural sectors are fundamentally incapable of grasping—let alone depicting—the velocity, enormity, and irreversibility of the crises unfolding around us (Ghosh 2016).

While Ghosh’s thesis begins with a critique of literary fiction — which, he asserts, banish the “improbable” and “uncanny” nature of the climate emergency to the margins — he expands this argument to include a critique of other sectors and institutions. For example, Ghosh asserts that the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change “is like a shimmering screen set up to conceal implicit bargains” and compromises, mired as it is in deranged “neoliberal” corporate terminology and techno-optimism. He contrasts this systematic obfuscation of reality with Pope Francis’s landmark encyclical letter Laudato Si’, which speaks with simple, urgent clarity about the link between environmental harm, social justice and human limits (Ghosh 2016; Jandl 2018).

Unlike many public figures who consider culture as an inconsequential bystander to the climate emergency, Ghosh explicitly calls culture and its stewards to task:

“Is it possible that the arts and literature of this time will one day be remembered not for their daring, nor for their championing of freedom, but rather because of their complicity in the Great Derangement?” (Ghosh 2016)

The problem Ghosh exposes is not that publishers, climate negotiators, and museum directors are entirely unaware of the challenges we face, but that the deeply ingrained norms and behaviors of their institutional practices do not allow for the full expression or processing of the relevant facts. For example, in “The Port,” a permanent exhibition about container shipping and logistics at Denmark’s Experimentarium children’s museum, maratime trade is depicted as an indistrial process with mention of its social and environmental dimensions — a decision made more challenging by the museum’s financial supporter, Danish shipping giant Maersk (Experimentarium n.d.).

As the Museums Are Not Neutral movement made clear, design choices consistently convey explicit values and bias — there is no truly neutral point of view (Autry and Murawski 2022). Furthermore, traditional “information deficit models” of museum education — which assume that the “neutral” act of presenting facts leads to behavior change—have been discredited by neuroscience, with researchers noting in particular that when people encounter climate-science information that contradicts their worldview they are likely to dismiss the new information and “double down” on their prior beliefs and (Duhaime 2022).

Avoiding social and environmental realities under the guise of sanctuary or neutrality seems to be an abdication of our responsibility to help young people learn to navigate the complex global challenges that are having such a profound effect on their lives and futures.

5. Natality and Places of Appearance

Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Saskia Sassen, Shoshana Zuboff, and others, I assert that the way forward is to see museums, libraries, and other cultural, literary, and performing-arts institutions as “places of appearance” that constitute the human process of “natality” — of making the world anew.

The theoretical engine for this institutional transformation is Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality. In her landmark work The Human Condition (1958), Arendt defined natality as the capacity of every new generation to execute the essential cultural function of rebirth—literally making the world anew through fresh speech and unprecedented action. Arendt reasoned that natality is the ontological root of human creativity and political change — that each birth brings a distinct, unpredictable new beginning into the human story.

In our current moment of revolution and rupture, natality is the primary engine of systemic renewal. In this worldview, young people are not merely “future adults,” passive vessels to be filled with facts, or “adults-in-training” to be managed. They possess an innate moral clarity, honesty, and courage that deranged institutions desperately lack. I assert that a crucial role of the modern museum is to become a “place of appearance,” in Arendt’s terms — a protected space, the opposite of Sassen’s expulsion — where this natality can manifest, serving as the civic environment where young people can appear together, develop their voice and agency, and shape the future through their skills and action.

The Museum and the Global Street

It is not a stretch to imagine museums as modern places of appearance. As Sassen described, young people create their own global street when denied of other forms of presence and agency, and lacking access to conventional halls of power young people have already laid claim to the museum.

Youth-led climate actions in European galleries — such as demonstrations at the Van Gogh Museum and the Mauritshuis — demonstrate this dynamic. For example, in October 2022, climate activists entered the Mauritshuis Museum, known for its longstanding financial relationship with fossil fuel corporation Royal Dutch Shell, and targeted Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. One protestor told the shocked crowd, “This painting is protected by glass. It is just fine … The future of our children is not protected” (“Campaigners celebrate as museums end ties with oil giant - Arts Professional” 2018; Udell 2024; Zajac 2024).

Protestors explicitly linked these museums to the broad passivity and inaction of the wider society and its dependence on extractive wealth. (Udell 2024; Zajac 2024).

Can museums and other cultural institutions develop themselves as places of appearance that constitute and nurture natality in the Arendtian sense? One can see this possibility emerging in several global examples [2].

London’s Southbank Centre: Southbank Centre is a beloved and popular multi-venue civic and performing arts complex on the South bank of the Thames river in London. Its open interior and exterior spaces have long served as a haven for creatives, families, and everyday public life. Famous for its radically democratic design, concert venues, and progressive festival programming Southbank Centre is widely celebrated as an exemplar of the open city (The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK Branch 2017). One young activist at the Centre’s gritty Undercroft stated that Southbank “is the only place in the city where no one asks you where you’re from, what school you go to, or what your parents do. You just show up, you look out for each other, and you build something together” (Quoted in Snelson et al. 2022).
Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum: In 2019, the museum hosted America to Zanzibar: Muslim Cultures Near and Far. In a political climate saturated with Islamophobic rhetoric, the museum actively invited local Muslim families, artists, and leaders to shape the exhibition, providing a highly visible space of appearance inside a major civic institution. The museum’s President and CEO, Patricia Wellenbach, stated: “Philadelphia is a very diverse city and region; home to families of many cultures, faiths, and identities … Children today live in an increasingly interconnected world and are more aware at earlier ages of difference and the complexities of everyday life” (Holmes 2019; Inside Please Touch Museum: Q&A with President and CEO Patricia Wellenbach 2019).
Ireland’s Youth Assembly on Biodiversity Loss: Structured as a formal advisory body, this assembly brought children aged 8 to 16 together to create 58 policy recommendations for Parliament. The output of this assembly was a suite of 58 uncompromising recommendations delivered directly to the Irish Parliament including specific targets and timelines for re-wilding and protecting public spaces; mandatory, action-oriented biodiversity education for all age groups, strict corporate and agricultural accountability, and crucially that the Irish Constitution be amended to recognize nature as a legal entity with its own fundamental rights to exist, persist, and restore itself. The young assembly members concluded: “We must treat the Earth like a member of the family or a friend … Future generations must live in a world where there isn’t a biodiversity crisis and where children don’t have to take action because of the incapability of past generations” (“Home – Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss” 2022; Democracy Next: Another Democratic Future 2026)

6. The Museum of Solutions, Mumbai

The Museum of Solutions opened in November 2023 as a brand new, state-of-the-art, 10-story children’s museum and not-for-profit institution. The museum is the brainchild of Founder and CEO Tanvi Jindal, and has been primarily funded by the JSW Foundation—the philanthropic and Corporate Social Responsibility arm of the Jindal family’s business conglomerate, the JSW Group. I was an advisor to the project during its 2020-2023 startup, and served as MuSo’s founding Director and Chief Museum Officer during the museum’s 2023-2024 launch year.

From conception through launch, MuSo was oriented toward the lives and futures of young people and the development of their capabilities as consequential civic actors. It is from MuSo’s example, and the strategizing, problem solving, and discussions we had there, that this essay’s 5-part thesis of revolution, rupture, and agency emererged.

MuSo’s opening mission was to inspire, empower, and enable young people to solve the world’s most pressing problems together, today [3]. As Tanvi Jindal told me when we first discussed the project in 2020: “Our galleries in the museum have been inspired by 10 UN SDGs [and] we are targeting mainly the future generation. It is extremely important in today’s environment for children to be socially conscious of their actions and decisions” [4]. The words “We believe that children can change the world” are painted in colorful 2-meter-high letters on the building’s facade — though a young visitor, an organizer of local beach cleanups, stopped me in the museum one day to tell me, “You need to change that mural: Young people do change the world. It’s a fact.”)

In its inaugural year, MuSo received the international Children in Museums Award (CMA) from the European Museum Academy and Hands On! International, and was named to TIME Magazine’s World’s Greatest Places list (Binayak 2024; Children In Museums Award 2024 - hands on! 2024). The CMA award citation stated:

“There is no doubt that within India, with its very traditional teaching methods, MuSo is revolutionary, but its ethos is a model for many other countries, while considering national differences. MuSo has a strong belief in the power of children and that children are the changemakers. The young visitors are encouraged and empowered to think for themselves and to find methods and solutions, looking to the future, to make a better world for their communities.”

To understand MuSo as a Place of Appearance it’s important to know a little bit about the position of young people in Mumbai.

The Mumbai metropolitan area has more than 8.5 million children and youth (ORGI, UNFPA 2014), but Mumbai is almost entirely devoid of civic spaces for the young. There are few open spaces and public parks, and for middle- and upper-class children, “leisure time” outside the home is often confined to the secure commercial perimeters of indoor shopping malls and for-profit play attractions. For most of the young people my colleagues and I knew — and we knew many across Mumbai’s full cultural and economic spectrum—life was typically either a heavily scheduled gauntlet of school and competitive after-school academic programs; or it was short school days followed by long hours of menial labor. As iconic Indian engineer and educator Sonam Wangchuck told me at the museum in 2023: “childhood is short” for Mumbai’s youth. In Saskia Sassen’s terms, one could say that many of Mumbai’s youth have been functionally expelled from their own Global Streets.

MuSo was, in my eyes, envisioned to be a radical, deliberate alternative to this narrative.

“Radical”

I use the word ‘radical’ quite precisely here, and with a bit of frisson. One of the museum’s three organizing principles, or pillars, is to be radically inclusive — meaning, in the eyes of the staff, to provide a safe and sheltered home where young people from all walks of life could meet and appear together in the true Arendtian sense. (The other two pillars are boldly child led and rooted to reality.) This was often challenging to achieve in practice, but it was in my experience the single most important and unifying purpose for staff members and one they held most dear in their identity as people, citizens, and in their vision for the future of India.

The word radical gets thrown around a lot in museology — radical trust, radical empathy, radical openness — but MuSo was the first place I ever felt that I was participating in something that truly sought to live up to that label. And I thought it was subversive, not in the political sense but in the sense of exerting pressure on the established order of things — things like education, memorization and test-based schooling, the absence green green space and clean water, and the ever-loming issues of inequality and justice — by so elegantly platforming the idea that young people were important, worthy of such an institution, and that they had important things to say and do in the public sphere.

And while I never worried about young people’s eagerness to take up the reins I sometimes worried about the moment when their truth-telling and precocious activism would become threatening to adults. But I shouldn't have worried. More often than not, connecting with young citizens and hearing their ideas emboldened adults to face their own failures and begin to work on hard problems, side-by-side with youth. The typical absence of young people in the public square is its own, crippling form of derangement, and one which places like MuSo help to heal.

Showing up is only part of the game though. It is a common trope of modern museology that “stories” and “connections” are what the museum is all about, but echoing Nancy Bedford’s research on museum narratives (2001) a lot depends on what those stories and connections are actually about. MuSo was a veritable engine of consequential stories and connections — seemingly all day, every day — because the museum itself was built in the middle of bold and consequential challenges, close to the hearts and minds of the visitors, and there were few if any other conveners or places of appearance to honor and advance their voices and agency.

Conclusion: Allyship as a Strategic Act

I opened up this essay by asking the question: Why build a children’s museum in Mumbai at all, or any museum in a world beset by social, technological, and environmental challenges?

Topics such as civilizational rupture and planetary peril may seem out of place in a volume dedicated to children in museums. These subjects rarely appear in the day-to-day administrative work of museums and many institutional leaders, funders, and policymakers feel out of their depth with this material — repelled by its urgency or convinced it is irrelevant to their institutions or personal/professional responsibilities. This is the quotidian face of institutional derangement. Yet young people routinely remind us that it is the planetary and socio-technical story — not the legacy scope and habits of cultural institutions — that will determine their lives and futures.

I believe the global cultural sector must elevate its ambitions. Museums, libraries, and other cultural, knowledge, and memory institutions can no longer view themselves as neutral parties or separate from life in the communities they serve; the museum must recreate itself — now, and in significant numbers — to become an essential part of a global infrastructure of appearance and rebirth. Or as sociologist and media theorist Zeynep Tufecki wrote in Scientific American, “In a historic … we need all the sociological imagination we can get…" (Tufekci 2019)

It is within this setting that the words allyship and to constitute take on a significant, strategic weight. In thinking about the relationship between the museum and young people we sometimes say that we are giving children their rights, but this parochial framing is a thinking error, and leads to mistakes in museological design and execution. Children do not depend on museums or any other institution to grant them their rights; those rights, their natality, and their moral standing exist whether an institution acknowledges those rights or not. The task at hand, I believe, is to become allies to young people, and to help them constitute their right to the future tense. In this way we can expands our cultural practitioner’s playbook into a truly consequential domain. By creating places of appearance that constitute the process of natality we are serving as the functional infrastructure through which young people bring their inherent joy and power into the full light of the public sphere.

Coda — Resources, Examples, AI, and Making Change

In this short essay I have focused on raising awareness and urgency regarding the drivers of revolution, rupture, and Consequences; the position of youth; the centrality of megacities and the global street; and the pathway towards natality and places of appearance.
But in other works — particularly these “reference slides” — I’ve delved into the crucial topic of organizational/sectoral change and described dozens of examples from the cultural sector and related fields that demonstrate what is possible.
I have also written a soon-to-be-published article for the MDPI journal Future Collections, Libraries, Archives, and Museums that delves more deeply into AI’s role as a driver of disruption and change. I’ll post it to this blog and link to it here when it’s up.

Finally, if these ideas and examples interest you, or if you see something that needs improvement of have something to add, please get in touch :) https://usingdata.com/contact

Notes

1 NBIC is the acronym for Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology, and Cognitive science.

2 See the author’s presentation for more examples: https://www.usingdata.com/usingdata/youth-megacities-and-the-new-museums-of-the-future-reference-slides (Edson 2026b)

3 The mission/purpose statement evolved to become: “To inspire, enable, and empower children to make meaningful change in the world, together, today.” https://museumofsolutions.in/about

4 Personal communication with the author, February 2020. “SDGs” are the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. https://sdgs.un.org/goals

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