Sustainability as a Driving Force: Perspectives on Museums in Germany as Social Actors

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Notes

1 This view was recently expressed, for example, by a Bezirksheimatpfleger (district curator responsible for museums) at the conference Heimatmuseen erneuern! Ehrenamtliche Museen als Orte gesellschaftlichen Austauschs [Renewing local museums! Volunteer museums as places of social exchange] on 27 October 2023 in Munich.

2 All translations of German sources in this article are from the author.

3 Sociologist Ray Oldenburg (1999) distinguished between the ‘first place’ (home, family), the ‘second place’ (work, professional sphere) and the ‘third place’ (meeting places and places of community as balance to family and work).

4 For example, seminars, workshops and exhibition projects on sustainable museum work have been held by the Chair of Museology at the University of Wurzburg since 2022. In addition, as part of the research project GreenMuseumHub: Sustainable Futures for Museums and Heritage Sites, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service/DAAD, the universities of Wurzburg (Germany), Helwan (Cairo, Egypt) and Manouba (Tunis, Tunisia) will establish a network of around 30 museums in participating countries between 2023 and 2025 for the digital and physical transfer of knowledge; students are also involved in this project. See Ziegler 2013.

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Notes on contributors

Guido Fackler

Guido Fackler (PhD) is a Professor of Museology at the University of Würzburg. He earned degrees in folklore, musicology and ethnology at the University of Freiburg. Prior to taking up his position at the University of Würzburg, where he has been developing programmes in museology and museum studies, he completed a traineeship at the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe, and filled various positions as a research assistant in European Ethnology/Folklore at the Universities of Regensburg and Würzburg. His main research interests include exhibitions (physical-digital), museology, audience research, issues of landscape and space using the example of artificial waterways (habilitation in 2012 at the University of Würzburg), and music in the Nazi camp system (the latter was the topic of his Doctoral thesis in 2000 at the University of Freiburg).