The Liverpool Thesis: What drives "culture" at a moment of extraordinary Change?
This is a fleshed-out version of a set of slides I first started working on for the Hands On! Children in Museums conference in Liverpool, England in November, 2025.
At the time I really struggled to explain, in fewer than 200 slides, how and why the world is changing and what difference that should make to the people who take responsibility for culture and cultural heritage (museums, libraries, knowledge and memory institutions & etc) and those who think about and work towards improving young people’s futures.
In standard museum practice, and particularly in children’s museums, I think there’s often a mindset that young people are small, proto-adults, ready to receive our guidance and wisdom, who need protection from the adult world while they develop. And while this is true to some degree (and depending on the age and developmental level of the child), despite our inclination to protect them the decisions of adults have foreclosed on young people’s futures in unprecedented ways.
Young people are no longer afforded a long, blissful childhood free of concern about the climate emergency, loss of biodiversity, biotech, AI, the poisoning of the public sphere, and the diminishment of truth, reason, and human rights. And these have dimmed the future not just for children but for all of us.
My approach here is to take this set of slides to weave together a coherent story about the world we actually live in and what that implies for the role and purpose of cultural institutions and cultural practice.
Then, in a longer set of reference slides, provide more depth, references, examples, and practical tools and frameworks that practitioners can use to investigate these assertions on their own and perhaps initiate change in their own work and institutions.
Basically, I am asserting that thinking about the world now from the perspective of young people gives us clearer insight into the revolution, disruption, and “derangement” (our inability to grasp the scale of the climate crisis through our current cultural forms; a term from Amitav Ghosh) we now face together.
…And as a result, institutions (such as “culture”, knowledge, memory…) must now be “places of appearance” — a term from Hannah Arendt —where people constitute their agency to build a better world.
Here’s the thesis, in a nutshell:
Cultural Revolution — We are living in the middle of a cultural revolution, not yet usefully described in the public sphere, that is driving a wedge between citizens (adults), young people, and a future that is joyous, sustainable and just.
Ruptures – The cultural revolution consists of ruptures in values, knowing, and power. This creates a derangement that we feel in civics, democracy, and everyday life.
Drivers — These ruptures are more than mere politics and norms: they arise from a violent confluence: a “phase change” in our relationship to the biosphere, the social sphere, and technology. This creates an “age of consequences” in which the presumption of a stable, predictable world is gone.
Institutions — In this deranged moment, institutions — our intermediaries of culture and power (such as the “cultural sector”, broadly defined) — must be our allies in natality, building our capacity to create new worlds through actions and speech. Without this we are stranded between the world that has passed and the one that will, by necessity, be born.
The Global Street — This drama of revolution, rupture, derangement, and rebirth is now playing out on the global street of global cities. The future will be won or lost here, where “culture” helps to constitute, or fails to constitute, our right to stand together as authors of a better world.
These points build on the work of Ghosh, Saskia Sassen (the global city, global street), Hannah Arendt (natality and places of appearance), and Donella Meadows (systems change), among others.
Finally, a note about “children’s museums.”
I don’t think the museum, library, and cultural sector takes museums for children and youth seriously enough, to their own and our collective detriment.
Every discipline teaches us a new way to see the world. And thought I have worked for many years on using cultural infrastructure to spark and sustain global civic engagement I had never immersed myself in the beautiful complexities of children’s museums and children’s futures until I started working on MuSo, the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai.
Seeing the world — this world, now — through the eyes of young people has been extraordinarily clarifying; and the discipline of children’s museum practice, in which I am still a rank beginner, has drawn me into the most beautiful and consequential ideas I’ve ever encountered. The world of adults is plainly out of sync with reality and constituting the rights, moral standing, and capabilities of young people may lead us to constituting them for the rest of us, the planet, and all living things.
I invite you to flip through these—not as a finished product, but as a provocation on what this moment mean and what our institutions must become.