Manuscript for Youth, Megacities, and Culture in the Age of Consequences (Liverpool Thesis)

I just completed this draft essay / book chapter (download PDF), 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 and this my most thorough and detailed effort so far, with long bibliography and a long-long list of citations.

1. We are in the middle of a new 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.

2. This revolution and rupture is unfolding everywhere, but it is most acutely seen and addressed in megacities and on the “Global Street.”

3. 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.”

4. 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.

5. 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.

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 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.