Museological Activism and Cultural Citizenship : Collecting the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

This chapter provides a reflexive account of the experiences of the Collective members involved in putting the collection together. It describes the Collective as a civic project for pursuing cultural citizenship in support of a democratic society. The chapter explores the notion of cultural citizenship offers a perspective for us to examine the civil-led museological activism. It explains the Collective’s practices as a cultural citizen-making process, at both the organizational and collection levels. The chapter focuses on the organizational process of the Collective, and shows how the subjects related themselves to the group reality of the movement. It highlights the Collection project and its outcomes emerged through a democratic participatory and empowering process of ‘becoming’ cultural citizens. The chapter analyses the museological approaches of the Collective and also explores the material dimension of the Collection by examining the group’s collecting principles and the ‘things’ they collected from the occupied sites.