As anthropologists specializing in museums and heritage who came of age professionally in a moment of disciplinary crisis amid calls for experimental ethnography, we are drawn to curatorial work as a valuable methodology that simultaneously embraces research, analysis, cultural representation, creative expression, social intervention, and dialogue with broad publics. We offer curatorial dreaming as an alternative mode of critical, intellectual practice—a form of “theorizing in the concrete.” In the spirit of civically engaged research, and in support of new kinds of knowledge production arising from the crossing of disciplinary and professional boundaries, we hope that Curatorial Dreams will speak not only to critical museum scholars or to a broader field of humanities and social science researchers, but also to curators and other museum practitioners such as educators. Further, we hope that Curatorial Dreams will inspire those differently situated experts to speak to each other.

As we tell our students, all exhibitions are arguments. They make assertions about history and aesthetics, about what counts as progress, and about the actual and appropriate relationships among people and between people and things. Exhibits naturalize particular ways of looking at the world. They can also clear paths for new ways of seeing. Critical humanities scholars know this only too well and have taken it as their task to illuminate, deconstruct, and demystify museum worlds. But is this the only relationship scholars can have with exhibition arguments? By tapping into the power of aspirational imagination to propel cultural theory and museum practice forward and grapple creatively with pressing social, cultural, and political concerns, Curatorial Dreams proposes a new method of academic knowledge production. We go beyond the vagueness associated with much utopian thinking and avoid the common pattern of enacting “good works” at disciplinary margins while leaving core modes of practice and inquiry unquestioned. Instead, we explore the concrete process of designing exhibitions as a mode of thinking, theorizing, researching, experimenting, and argumentation that reconsiders the forms these can—and perhaps should—take.

We are cognizant that our project enters terrain fraught with tensions that divide museological theorists and museum practitioners. Scholars claim that museums present simplistic versions of culture and history. But they too often overlook the specialized knowledge that museum practitioners possess about the workings of their institutions and the way their visitors use them.