What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The collection explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present, arguing that this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific.

Introduction: conceptualising Curatopia - Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy and Eveline DürrPart I: Europe1 The museum as method (revisited) - Nicholas Thomas2 What not to collect? Post-connoisseurial dystopia and the profusion of things - Sharon Macdonald and Jennie Morgan3 Concerning curatorial practice in ethnological museums: an epistemology of postcolonial debate - Larissa Förster and Friedrich von Bose4 Walking the fine line: From Samoa with Love? at the Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich - Hilke Thode-Arora 5 Curating across the colonial divides - Jette Sandahl6 Thinking and working through difference: remaking the ethnographic museum in the global contemporary - Viv Golding and Wayne ModestPart II: North America7 The times of the curator - James Clifford8 Baroque modernity, critique and Indigenous epistemologies in museum representations of the Andes and Amazonia - Anthony Alan Shelton9 Swings and roundabouts: pluralism and the politics of change in Canada's national museums - Ruth B. Phillips10 Community engagement, Indigenous heritage and the complex figure of the curator: foe, facilitator, friend or forsaken? - Bryony Onciul11 Joining the club: a Tongan 'akau in New England - Ivan Gaskell12 c'?sna??m, the City before the City: exhibiting pre-Indigenous belonging in Vancouver - Paul TapsellPart III: Pacific 13 The figure of the kaitiaki: learning from Maori curatorship past and present - Conal McCarthy, Arapata Hakiwai and Philipp Schorch14 Curating the uncommons: taking care of difference in museums - Billie Lythberg, Wayne Ngata and Amiria Salmond15 Collecting, curating and exhibiting cross-cultural material histories in a post-settler society - Bronwyn Labrum16 Curating relations between 'us' and 'them': the changing role of migration museums in Australia ­- Andrea Witcomb17 Agency and authority: the politics of co-collecting - Sean Mallon18 He alo a he alo / kanohi ki te kanohi / face to face: curatorial bodies, encounters and relations - Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, Moana Nepia and Philipp SchorchAfterwords 19 Curating time - Ian Wedde20 Virtual museums and new directions? - Vilsoni HerenikoIndex