Developing Pedagogies of Human Rights and Social Justice in the Prison Museum

• In Event: Wanted (For Display), Dead or Alive: Interrogating the Ethics of Touring Prisons, Penal Museums and Captured Bodies

Abstract

This paper explores the development of pedagogies in the prison museum. It focuses on the museum as a learning space at international sites including: Robben Island Museum in Cape Town South Africa; the Penitentiary Museum in Philadelphia USA and Amna Sura Ka in Kurdistan Iraq. Crime and punishment within the justice system can be seen as markers of civilised society around the world and prisons can be viewed as means of enshrining fundamental human rights; protecting the vulnerable and weak from the forces of wickedness. Yet what counts as justice varies across nations and times. Many of those who stood in opposition the regimes of Sadam in Iraq and Apartheid in South Africa for example were incarcerated, tortured and killed in prison. Today these prisons operate as memorial spaces – sites of ‘difficult histories’ – where not only the lives of the famous heroes who suffered for their basic human rights and resisted oppression, but also the ordinary men, women and children who battled against inequity are represented. The chapter considers the wide range of pedagogic work at the prison museum, how together with artists and psychologists for example, audiences can come to be engaged in the present, their minds, bodies and emotions, with what Roger Simon terms the ‘terrible gift’ of the past, which impels us all to take responsibility for the future and act at local and global levels.

Author

• Viv Golding, University of Leicester