Links of the Week: December 10, 2021: Everything Must Go, Part 2


Some end-of-year reading on museums, silos, learning, racism, leadership, and climate

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This is a pretty long list of articles, so I'll keep the narratives brief. Many of the articles listed here relate to multiple areas of focus, so my choices are probably pretty arbitrary, but what isn't in the content game?  

Now I know that many of my links are not directly museum-related, but I think they're all important for museum folks to consider in their own discussions and decision-making. There's a reason I included a link about Netflix investing in Black-owned banks as a budget line and not charity—museums need to consider the involvement of people in neighboring areas as a business decision and an ethically just thing to do, not just a philanthropic "nice to have" separate from the organizational bottom line for when "times are good."

In so many ways, we in museums need to expand our idea of what it means to work in a museum and what museum work means. Otherwise, we're going to be hiding in our own silos as things continue to deteriorate.

So let's start, beginning with articles tightly focused on museums and then moving outwards.

Museums focus

Silos, Learning, Leadership

The crisis of racism

  • This Medium piece from Umair Haque explains everything you need to know about racism in tech titan companies, and why nobody cares enough because the Facebooks of the world mostly harm women and minorities.
  • Wired had this article about Netflix investing in Black-owned banks (though $100 million to Netflix is just some cash lying around). At least the company is treating this as a budget-line expenditure and not just philanthropy.
  • HBR wrote about "sharing our stories" to build inclusion, but the question is whether this builds understanding or just a practice of white people searching their own lives in a game of find-a-moment-of-imperfection. It's not clear this practice will change org structures.

The Crisis of Climate Collapse

I hope you enjoy, or at least bookmark, these links. Stay tuned next week for a review of the top themes of Museum Human in 2021 and then the final everyone-out-of-the-pool Links of the Week for the year.


cover photo by Mor Shani / Unsplash [description: a sign reading "everything is temporary" next to a flower in a pot and a plant on a chair, on a gravel track in a park, with industrial buildings in the background]


Links of the Week: December 10, 2021: Everything Must Go, Part 2 by Robert J Weisberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.