Towards Fourth-Generation Science Museums: Changing Goals, Changing Roles

Once dominated by a focus on collecting and preserving, and later communicating science through hands-on experiences, science museums are slowly reshaping their identities and purposes to explicitly include and promote active citizenship, social responsibility, engagement with complex science and technology issues, and agency. Informed by progressive views of scientific literacy and dialogic and participatory models of communication, science museums are beginning to re-imagine their spaces and practices to embrace broader goals. This theoretical paper explores and discusses the changing roles and identities of these institutions through the emergence of what we identify as fourth-generation science museums and their six defining drivers (Pedretti & Navas Iannini, 2020). We argue science museums can become places that (1) embrace change and transformation; (2) promote productive struggle; (3) develop allyship; (4) foster empathy; (5) support epistemic democracy; and (6) act as a hybrid third space.