museum and heritage visiting

What is it about?

This chapter examines the performative and embodied nature of the museum visit and, in doing so, mounts a challenge to the dominance of the idea that the museum visit is, or should be, about learning. Rather, the argument advanced is that visitors use museums in a wide range of ways and that the learning paradigm restricts the ability of researchers and museum professionals to recognize this diversity. Understanding the visit as an embodied performance reveals the means by which visitors emotionally engage with museum exhibitions and thus identifies the ways in which visitors undertake their own “heritage‐making” and the production and reinforcement of their own meanings and cultural and political values. Interviews with visitors to museums and other sites of heritage in England, Australia, and the United States are used to illustrate and support the argument.

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Why is it important?

Challenges the idea that visitors go primarily to museums to be educated/to learn.