Fwd: Museums strives to create a space for challenging, critiquing, and providing alternative modes of thinking and production within and outside of museums. 

​Fwd: Museums Journal is produced and edited by graduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Museum and Exhibition Studies Program and published by Chicago-based StepSister Press. 

Email fwd.museums@gmail.com to purchase. Student discounts available.

Death To Museums 2019

"Death To Museums" is a call for disruption. It is a call to action and proclaims the need for change. This issue of Fwd: Museums asks: Do museums need to change to avoid their death? Do museums need to die in order to change? Are museums under attack? By whom and to what end? 

“Death To Museums” is an alert that cultural institutions held in public trust are at risk and need protection. It is an acknowledgment that museums are active battlegrounds in our deepening cultural conflicts. It is a threat that things will be different from now on. 
Museums are dead. Long live museums.

Available Now!

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A Museology that is not life-oriented is not worthy;
All the memories are kept in our bodies;
Our museological practice involves affection, fraternity, reciprocity, love, joy and poetry... 


Córdoba Declaration, XVIII International MINOM Conference, Córdoba/ Argentina, 2017 

Call for Submissions 2020

A home is not a house, and a house is not a home. A house contains objects and composes rooms. However, it is the concept of the home that connotes an expanded range of mindsets and desires. What does it mean to be a home?

A home informs individual and community identity. While the contemporary home has become synonymous with stature, prestige, and trend, instead of being a place for truth, comfort, and a sense of security. And yet, some people find their homes in strange ways, new countries, and even housed in institutional spaces like museums. Can museums function or have qualities of a home?

 A home is an assemblage of spaces that build emotional intelligence, characterizes ecological concerns, stages diverse ideologies, celebrates culture, makes or breaks political belief, and records the history of the inhabitants in imagined or factual ways. How can one word hold such power and embody so many meanings?

A home is personal. It can be a thought, a mood, a memory, a smell or an image. As a place of steady routines and rituals, inhabitants can intimately connect with every nook, cranny, and detail while recounting the stories and secrets of their home. What secrets reside in your home?

A home is a collective obsession. As a marketing campaign for the ‘American Dream’, today’s populace is bombarded with home improvement shows with visions of bigger is better. The commercial domain of domesticity is branding and selling a home as a product. Within the Craigslist ecosystem of click-view-select we hunt for rental spaces and even DIY projects that impart a sense of home, becoming wanderers in search of the perfect abode. Meanwhile, the struggle to avoid homelessness in the face of housing shortages often reduces the home to a mere refuge. How does a home become an asylum or a prison?

A home is ever changing. This issue proposes home as a universal concept that is relative in its struggles, iterations, and connotations. From the habits and connections in the domestic sphere experienced everyday to the compressions and extensions of borders and behavior at the Homeland Security checkpoints, share your stories, visions, and projections of HOME with Fwd: Museums.

​Submission topics may include but are not limited to:
Collections within the home
House museums
How collections and artifacts are housed  
Comfort/Safety experiences within museums and lack thereof  
Feeling at home in museums
Family/Challenging ideas of family
Artifacts from people's homes
Looting/Repatriation
Beyond Repatriation
Home/house archiving
How museums address im/migration or displacement from home/homelands
Gentrification/Artwashing/Homelessness
Public/Personal/Collective Memory
Preservation and destruction
Heritage/Culture
Depictions of home in art
Domesticity explored/Roles we play inside the home
Home as a basic human right
Libraries vs. museums as open public spaces
Design as a tool to make a home/anti-home 
Defining borders 
Architecture - the bones of a/that make a home
Site of civic engagement/communal spaces
Invasions of the home
And many more!

Deadline: January 5, 2020 by 11:59 (CT)

Submission form & more info: 
https://tinyurl.com/Fwd2020
Email us: fwd.museums@gmail.com


Fwd: Museums invites academic articles, artwork, essays, exhibition/book reviews, creative writing, interviews, poetry, love letters, and other experimental forms to analyze, critique, and make space for new thinking about museums and exhibitions.
All submissions should follow the guidelines and relate to the journal’s mission statement (see above). We strongly encourage book and exhibition reviews on multiple topics, but require all other submissions to connect to the fifth issue’s theme, “HOME.”

Guidelines
​Written submissions should be between 1,000 and 2,500 words and in one of the following formats: DOCX, using Chicago Manual of Style formatting and citations.

All images should be sent as separate files (not embedded in text) at 300+ dpi in tiff format. Note in text where images should be inserted and include credit, caption, date of execution, materials used, and dimensions, as appropriate.

A Note on Reviews
Reviews need not directly engage the issue’s theme but should relate to the journal’s mission statement (see below). We welcome long-form museum, exhibition, film, and book reviews with a point of view and connections to social, historical, political and other contexts.

Who Should Submit?
Students, faculty, scholars, professionals, artists, amateurs, adjuncts, volunteers, part-timers, philanthropists, activists, and other people with something to say about museums, exhibits, and cultural work are welcome to submit.

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