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<p>This paper1 investigates the sources of representations on the communist period and the type of engagement with the past in an experiential museum, in the context of the National Network of Romanian Museums’ project for a laboratory-museum of Romanian Communism. Our analysis of focus-groups in October-November 2012 explores the public’s expectations in terms of museum experience and engagement with objects and the potential of an experiential museum to facilitate deliberation about the past. We use the conceptual framework of recent studies on postmemory (Hirsch, 2008) and prosthetic memory (Landsberg, 2004, 2009) to focus on ways of building the experiential archive needed to produce prosthetic memory. We consider that such an analysis is relevant for two interconnected problems: the bidirectional relationship between a projected museum of communism and a prospective public, and the methodological insights available for investigating this relation. With regard to the first problem, this paper makes a case for treating museums as a memory device rather than a lieu de memoire and analyses the role of the museum in relation to cultural memory. With regard to the second problem, it offers an example of conducting research on prospective publics which departs from traditional marketing approaches, adopting theoretical insights and analytical categories from specific conceptualizations in the field of memory studies.</p>

In this paper we investigate how the model of deliberation proposed by Isabela and Norman Fairclough can be used for a better clarification and understanding of the framing processes in media -especially in opinion articles. We thus aim at integrating theoretical contributions from critical discourse analysis and argumentation theory with standard approaches to framing, originating in media studies. We emphasize how a rhetorical approach to framing can provide analytical insights into framing processes and complement the typical quantitative approaches with qualitative analysis based on textual reconstruction. Starting from an issue-specific approach to framing, we discuss a particular case of framing of intra-EU migration, analyzing four opinion articles selected from a larger corpus of Romanian, British and French media. We highlight, along our analysis, various methodological options and analytical difficulties inherent to such an approach.

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Photography has been, from its early stages, a powerful tool for the anthropologist, both as a mechanical technique to record data and as a heuristic tool used to reflect on the anthropologist's approach as such. At the same time, its iconicity and indexicality have allowed for a different epistemic regime, an allegedly privileged connection to "the facts" or "the truth", in opposition to the written notes of the anthropologist, vulnerable to subjectivity, bias or error. A substantial direction in visual culture studies questions the articulation of image and text, and acknowledges a power relation between the two, as if despite its iconicity and indexicality, photography needs taming by the text that clarifies its meaning and incorporates it in bigger narratives. It is in this context that W. J. T. Mitchell echoes the famous question "Can the subaltern speak?" in relation to photography, asking "What do pictures want?" (Mitchell, 2005, pp. 28-30). It is within this vision of photography as a potential site of resistance to the narrative in which they are embedded that I will try to raise some critical points about Bruce O'Neill's book, The Space of Boredom, by focusing on the photos included in this book.In the subchapter Shelters and the Infrastructure of Boredom, the reader encounters two photos. What we see is the Backwoods shelter, and the two photos reveal the same "infrastructure": corridors with walls covered in (what seems to look like) wood panels, the ubiquitous uPVC doors and windows (termopane) of post-communist Romania and the mosaic tiles reminding of the communist period rather than of its aftermath. There are, however, substantial differences between the two images. While in the first one, the outside world is completely missing, and the light is provided by neon tubes, in the second, the scene is lit from the outside by natural light, creating a contre-jour effect, kept under control to allow us both to distinguish the details of the inside world and to make a sense of the outside world as well. More importantly, the first photo depicts just a long empty hallway, some buckets and cleaning tools breaking the rhythm of the doors, without animating the image, whereas the second picture contains activity: at least four persons of various ages take part in a game of tossing coins. It is the caption that clarifies what the activity is about, and for Romanians of a certain age it will bring to mind a game played in childhood, during breaks at school -Liniuþa. The first photo is typical for a range of images illustrating total institutions, and it reminds of standard approaches to the topic, from Goffman