The Research Centre for Material Culture is the research institute of the Wereldmuseum, Netherlands. We foster interdisciplinary, intersectional and speculative research, whether done by the museum’s own research staff or by national and international researchers. Bringing together scholars, makers, curators and activists from across the world, our research is centred around the museum and its practices, around our collections and their histories, and is always positioned in relation to pressing questions in the world. We are guided by the museum’s mission to foster world citizenship, and thus our ongoing work is geared towards exploring the multiple ways in which we live our lives in the world as humans, the individual and community tactics for living and giving shape to the world around us, and the structures that would serve to facilitate or constrain such modes of living.
As the research institute of the Wereldmuseum, the RCMC positions itself at the intersection between the museum and the outside world. To sustain a criticality to the organisation, the centre consciously chooses a position that is more outside of the organisation, aligning its objectives with our collaborators. While the work of the RCMC is specialised around theory-making, it is designed to be complementary to that of the curatorial, exhibition-making, programming and education sectors of the museum(s). Most significantly, the RCMC actively seeks to explore vantage points from outside the museum, which we then bring into conversation with its internal operations. In this way, our work is envisioned to help develop practices within the museum that can productively contribute to building a just institution of world citizenship. Moreover, due to its speculative nature, our work is deliberately exploratory, rather than fixed or prescriptive. We identify discourses, interventions and methodologies that we believe can be productive for the museum to work through the problems inherent within it.