Christidou, D. and Diamantopoulou, S. (2016) The Choreography of Visitors' Participation While in the Museum (original) (raw)

By treating the museum visit as a multimodal, social event unfolding in the galleries, our paper will critically engage with the concept of ‘cultural participation’, which is often linked to ‘viewing’ or ‘going’ to a museum. It draws upon two sets of audio-visual data collected for two projects, both conducted partially or entirely in the UK, with pairs or groups of visitors in two museums in London, UK: the Museum of London and the Wellcome Collection. The analysis draws upon methodological developments within sociology and in particular Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy and frame analysis theory (1963; 1971), as well as Gunther Kress’s (2010) multimodal and social semiotic theory of representation and communication. It is through bridging together these two theories, ethnomethodology and multimodal social semiotics, that we engage in a much needed interdisciplinary conversation. The virtue of these perspectives is that, by contrast to structural and deterministic sociological approaches, they permit us to theorize the agency of visitors in museum visiting. The article proposes an appropriate interpretative and methodological framework which illuminates the social worlds of museums. Both the theoretical framework and the methodological tools employed allow the traditional mind-body dualism to be overcome in order to explore the modes and performances of visitors’ encounters, as they arise in and through interaction with people and exhibits. It argues that visitors’ participation can be approached by taking into consideration the ways in which different modes of communication and representation are ‘orchestrated’ and ‘animated’ through the agentive action, ‘the performance’ and ‘choreography’ of the visitors within the social context of the visit. By drawing upon multimodality, we show how talk, gesture, gaze and elements of the space and place blend together and contribute to the multimodality of participation, accounting for the ‘orchestration’ of multiple modes of participation.