Critical exhibits and public engagement: Challenges and possibilities (original) (raw)

Public engagement with critical exhibitions: Insights from a Brazilian and a Canadian science museum

2018

Critical exhibitions represent a trend in the science museums landscape. These installations, often issues-based, tend to: display complex socio-scientific issues, approach controversy, challenge visitors’ points of view, and engage visitors in active ways. Informed by theory in the fields of science communication, scientific literacy and science museums, I examined visitors’, curators’ and museum educators’ perspectives on critical exhibitions in Brazil and Canada. I also investigated dimensions of engagement that visitors experienced in these exhibits. Using a qualitative approach and multiple case study as a research strategy, I examined two individual cases: the exhibits Alerts: Knowing to Prevent. Drugs, Tobacco and Alcohol and Preventing Youth Pregnancy, displayed at the Catavento museum (São Paulo, Brazil), and Our World: BMO Sustainability Gallery displayed at the Science World (Vancouver, Canada). In both research sites I conducted observations and interviews with visitors,...

Centers of Experience: Bodies and Objects in Today's Museums

Experience Design: Concepts and Case Studies, 2015

How can we design better experiences? Experience Design brings together leading international scholars to provide a cross-section of critical thinking and professional practice within this emerging field. Contributors writing from theoretical, empirical and applied design perspectives address the meaning of 'experience'; draw on case studies to explore ways in which specific 'experiences' can be designed; examine which methodologies and practices are employed in this process; and consider how experience design interrelates with other academic and professional disciplines. In this essay we observe practices realized inside the museum in their efforts to include projects that are participatory, community-based, and socially engaged. Starting with the origins of the museum, this essay traces how the museum has evolved into a spectacular repository for today’s social consciousness and the potential for creative practitioners to use and design the space of the museum to generate meaningful experience on the levels of the corporeal and social body. This effort is haunted by the ever-increasing commodification of experience that contributes to the museum’s struggle for relevance and viability in terms of the pedagogical, the political and the ludic.

Encountering the ‘Other’: Interpreting Student Experiences of a Multi-Sensory Museum Exhibition

The Immigration Museum Melbourne, Australia, launched the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition in 2011. Aimed primarily at secondary school students, this long-term installation seeks to foster reflection on identity and belonging, as well as dialogue about racism, through an interactive, immersive museum experience. This paper describes a multi-method research project, which included narrative interviews, focus groups and video diaries with 47 Year 11–12 students from three secondary schools in Victoria, Australia, and discusses each method’s contribution to an overall empirical understanding of the installation’s impact on students’ experiences. Emerging findings suggest the ways in which the exhibition space supports students to encounter and engage with individual stories and experiences, thus moving beyond an abstract tolerance of cultural diversity by unsettling the self and destabilising stereotyped and prejudiced interpretations of the ‘other’. The paper concludes by discussing the potential for triangulated qualitative approaches to provide rich emic perspectives on multi-sensory exhibitions.