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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>

“Some warn that the disease will be remembered not only as a human catastrophe, but also as a geopolitical turning-point away from the West. Are they right?” (Minton Beddoes, 2020). Irrespective of the answer, this question raises the unsettling issue of the viability of the current international order. This is not a singular voice. For instance, Henry Kissinger unequivocally asserts that “The coronavirus pandemic will forever alter the world order” (Kissinger, 2020). Analyses focusing on the geopolitical impact of the current pandemic often employ apocalyptical imagery.

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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