Experiencing differences and negotiating prejudices at the Immigration Museum Melbourne

Abstract

The social agency of museums in countering prejudices and fostering respect for differences is increasingly recognised and empirical research has begun to illuminate the impacts of exhibitions devoted to 'difficult' subjects on audiences. This paper draws on an ongoing research project conducted by two Australian universities in collaboration with the Immigration Museum Melbourne aimed at understanding the role of the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition in countering racism and increasing the acceptance of differences among Australian high school students. The paper focuses on narrative interviews with students which offer insights into how differences are experienced and prejudices become negotiated through processes of meaning-making and embodied engagements. The empirical evidence indicates that the exhibition moves beyond the orchestration of an abstract tolerance by unsettling 'the Self' and destabilising stereotyped interpretations of 'the Other'. Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours creates a place and space of encounter in which differences are humanised, thus facilitating understandings of broader contexts through individual experiences. At the same time, the research findings suggest that the life worlds of students, their personal backgrounds and schools, are intertwined with their interpretive engagements with the exhibition and need to be considered for museum practices and further research.

‘We are… we are everything’: the politics of recognition and misrecognition at immigration museums

“…Most felt they were now better informed or had gained new information, augmenting or slightly altering their view points, while 4 per cent considered the museum had made them think about immigration history and/or contemporary issues in new ways. In these cases, and as documented by other studies (Schorch 2015;Smith 2016), changes of view only occurred when empathy and imagination were engaged. The point to emphasize here is that while some visitors were learning, using 'learning' as the primary framework to understand what visitors do, can itself misrecognize not only the range of meanings that visitors create, recreate and justify for themselves, but more importantly the social and political consequences of those meanings.…”

“…Although the agency of visitors to museums and heritage sites has been demonstrated (for example , Bagnall 2003;Dicks 2000;Smith 2006Smith , 2015Macdonald 2009;Schorch 2015), how this might work to theorize our understanding of visitors beyond ideas of learning and recreating is still to be worked through. An emerging debate, taken up in particular with regards to developing cosmopolitan recognitions of diversity and difference (Mason 2013), advocates that museums should be agents of social change, charged with the responsibility of influencing visitor attitudes (Sandell and Nightingale 2012).…”

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

“…Importantly, any such shift of one's sense of self 'occurs in and through otherness' (Gibson in Witcomb 2013: 267) and thus 'requires imagination and the ability to empathise, an ability that is encouraged by affective encounters' (Witcomb 2013: 267). The narrative interviews revealed that IYMO creates such encounters and offers students the interpretive, embodied resources to empathically and critically engage with the exhibition's controversial themes (Schorch 2015). Through this interpretive engagement between viewer and exhibition, and thus between self and 'other', some students had a reflexive and critical encounter with cultural differences.…”

“…The paper reflects on the use of a multi-method approach to understand the experiences of the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours (IYMO) exhibition at the Immigration Museum Melbourne, Australia, among secondary school students from diverse racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds to analyse the exhibition's capacity to reframe understandings (Kelly and Gordon 2002;Sandell 2007;Schorch 2013Schorch , 2015. We begin by embedding the project in the literature on museums, 'difficult' subjects and visitor studies.…”

Representations of migration, borders and memories in exhibitions: a multimodal text analysis

“…Witcomb 2013). Others have analyzed actual visitor responses to museums' attempts to cultivate empathy (Mason et al 2018;Schorch 2015). I have examined visitors meaning making elsewhere (eg.…”