Babel Tower. Museum people in dialogue. Introduction

This book has been elaborated by a part of the network that formed thanks to the webinar series "Babel Tower. Museum People in Dialogue". However, it is not equivalent to the webinar’s proceedings. Not all the series’ contributions have been collected here. Rather, some of the speakers agreed to deepen the main topics explored within the trans-national and trans-disciplinary dialogues conducted during the series. Their manuscripts have been collected in the format of a scientific publication aimed at contributing to the debate concerned with the intersection between museology, heritage studies, planning, and other disciplines that focus on spaces, places, territories, and landscapes, as an emerging field of experimentation. The editors think that there is an interesting overlap amongst such spheres of knowledge and practices that are here explored in relation to the concept of insurgencies. The underlying question is how to bridge community-based forms of territorial planning, governance and museology, aimed at opening new trajectories of emancipation for the most distressed groups (Freire, 1970), grounded on a multifaceted awareness of the past, an ethos of socio-ecological justice for the present, and an effort at intergenerational care for the future. However, this book is not concerned with defining “insurgencies” from a conceptual and a general standpoint. Rather, it offers a variety of contributions expressing specific and context-based nuances of such a broad lens of observation. These contributions are rooted in practices that offer the opportunity for reflecting upon them (Schön, 1983), thus advancing the theoretical debate.