Focused Discussion (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Psychology of Identity: Understanding Its Importance in Museums View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Paris Willoughby
In the cultural and social politics of public culture, museums, and communities, the goal should be to exemplify progress through developing understanding of the social complexities of history and narratives in museums. The multiplicity of cultures seeks to acknowledge and address institutional concerns in changing times and the pursuit of best practice behavior in professionals in the museum field. In between personal and direct interests, the relationship of identity and audience engagement, bond-forming is the application of cooperative action and honest engagement of the role of the subjective narrative of engaging with cultural identity. Additionally, intersectional communities are an important contemporary issue in democratization and decolonizing practices. These practices support the grander picture of effective best practice cooperative curation and understanding its importance to learning, identity, and engagement. In the process of development and organization, the importance of the relationship between cultural identity and the visitor experience in cultural institutions ought to be no mystery. Identity bonding and connecting with the society of which representative collection, create the type of sustainable social relationships that these spaces need to exist. Drawing on cultural displays and exhibitions and derivative knowledge and implicit contradictions of histories follow the complexity of multi-narrative and subjective aspects of individual cultural identities.
How Is Death Engaged with, Understood, and Exhibited in Museum Contexts?: The 'Death Matters' Exhibition View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Sarah Hiepler
This research addresses how death is engaged with, understood, and exhibited in museum contexts, specifically analyzing curatorial considerations, policies, and decision-making practices when planning an exhibition on death. The main field site is the University of Aberdeen’s Museum and Special Collections in Aberdeen, Scotland, and research is focused on the development and planning of an exhibition on death. The exhibition intends to introduce and speak to the topics of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ deaths, how the body is transformed upon or after death, the ‘soul,’ memorialization, and uses of the body after death. Through participant observation in the planning committee meetings and one-on-one interviews with staff, I consider data from the planning phase of the exhibition. Questions that guide my data collection include: what are the curatorial goals and intentions of exhibiting death, how are materials chosen for the exhibition, how will they be represented, how are these representations agreed upon or negotiated, what are the challenges, risks, and opportunities of exhibiting death, and considerations around public engagement opportunities. Similar questions are also raised in interviews with curatorial staff at other museums in the United Kingdom to gather additional data on how death is framed in order to contextualize the death exhibition in Aberdeen. The purpose of interviewing and gathering data from other institutions is not to provide a systematic analysis or survey of how museums display death, but to aid in highlighting the particular considerations and choices made in the Aberdeen death exhibition.
