CFP Emotion and Empathy ACHS Montreal 2016

Museums, memorial centres and other heritage institutions use various strategies to evoke an emotional response that serves to elicit empathy with the historical events and actors that are portrayed in exhibitions. To increase historical understanding, however, both emotional engagement with and contextual understanding of these historical figures are needed. Using the concept of historical empathy, this paper examines the continuous interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of history learning in museums. We conducted a case study at Museon in The Hague, the Netherlands. We studied a learning session on children living through the Second World War, the museum’s strategies employed in the exhibition, the entrance narratives of secondary school students participating in the session and their engagement with the exhibition and with the educational activities. While most of the students did not feel related to WWII prior to their museum visit, the museum managed to engage many of them with personal stories and artefacts and by offering multiple and new perspectives. Our findings underscore the interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of historical empathy and show that museums can serve as powerful contexts for developing this skill among school students.

Museums, memorial centres and other heritage institutions use various strategies to evoke an emotional response that serves to elicit empathy with the historical events and actors that are portrayed in exhibitions. To increase historical understanding, however, both emotional engagement with and contextual understanding of these historical figures are needed. Using the concept of historical empathy, this paper examines the continuous interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of history learning in museums. We conducted a case study at Museon in The Hague, the Netherlands. We studied a learning session on children living through the Second World War, the museum's strategies employed in the exhibition, the entrance narratives of secondary school students participating in the session and their engagement with the exhibition and with the educational activities. While most of the students did not feel related to WWII prior to their museum visit, the museum managed to engage many of them with personal stories and artefacts and by offering multiple and new perspectives. Our findings underscore the interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of historical empathy and show that museums can serve as powerful contexts for developing this skill among school students.

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018

2018

This chapter shows how visitors draw connections between historical and contemporary migration in relation to what they encounter in museum displays. It focuses on a small-scale research project conducted over the summer of 2015 with long-term residents whom people invited to visit the permanent display, Destination Tyneside, at Discovery Museum in Newcastle, UK. The chapter highlights how these research participants utilised not only resources such as museum objects and interpretive materials, but also childhood memories, debates in the media and narratives about place, in order to make sense of and review their position towards migrants. It explores the different ways in which the participants responded to the museum's invitation to empathise, and investigates how affective responses are part of these experiences. The chapter looks at the ways in which visitors negotiate empathy in the exhibition space through different kinds of 'memory work' provides a hitherto-undere...

Heritage and its economies are driven by affective power and consolidated through emotions such as pride, awe, joy and pain. In the humanities and social sciences, there is a widespread acknowledgement of the limits not only of language and subjectivity, but also of visuality and representation. Social scientists, particularly within cultural geography and cultural studies, have recently attempted to define and understand that which is more-than-representational, through the development of theories of affect, assemblage, post-humanism and actor network theory, to name a few. While there have been some recent attempts to draw these lines of thinking more forcefully into the field of heritage studies, this book focuses for the first time on relating heritage with the politics of affect. It argues that our engagements with heritage are almost entirely figured through the politics of affective registers such as pain, loss, joy, nostalgia, pleasure, belonging or anger. It brings together a number of contributions that collectively – and with critical acuity – question how researchers working in the field of heritage might begin to discover and describe affective experiences, especially those that are shaped and expressed in moments and spaces that can be, at times, intensely personal, intimately shared and ultimately social. It explores current theoretical advances that enable heritage to be affected, released from conventional understandings of both “heritage-as-objects” and as “objects-as-representations” by opening it up to a range of new meanings, emergent and formed in moments of encounter. Whilst representational understandings of heritage are by no means made redundant through this agenda, they are destabilized and can thus be judged anew in light of these developments. Each chapter offers a novel and provocative contribution, provided by an interdisciplinary team of researchers who are thinking theoretically about affect through landscapes, practices of commemoration, visitor experience, site interpretation and other heritage work.

The Public Historian

Museum Management and Curatorship, 2017

How do museums feel? Which of their histories are emotive, for whom, and why? What kinds of emotions could or should be represented -- and evoked -- by engaging with history? How should emotional experiences be facilitated in museum and heritage spaces, and to what ends? Emotion in the Museum will explore the changing role of emotion in the experiences of museums and heritage, from the perspectives of both the visitor and the practitioner. We will consider the meaning and usefulness of ‘emotion’ in its broadest sense, and explore emotions which aren’t typically attended to in academic or practitioner literature, such as joy, boredom, ‘flat affect’ (Smith and Campbell, 2017), disgust and fear. We are especially interested in hosting conversations around the emotional well-being of museum staff in times of economic and social crisis, as well as the impact that researching emotional histories can have on researchers and curators, and would welcome papers on this theme. The two-day conference is a collaborative event organised by the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP) at the University of York and York Museums Trust. It aims is to facilitate cross-sector conversations among academic researchers and museum professionals about the role that emotions across the spectrum might play in unlocking renewed understanding of personal and collective pasts, presents and futures. We invite contributions from museum and heritage professionals in any area, from researchers in disciplines across the arts, humanities and social sciences, and from special interest and community groups, including contributions which represent different national perspectives and case-studies. Although we invite contributions primarily in the form of 20-minute presentations, we are also keen to develop alternative formats and would welcome suggestions for plenaries, fringe workshops and facilitated sessions across the two days. To submit a proposal, please send an abstract of 250-300 words (including an indication of the preferred format of your contribution), together with a brief biographical note of no more than 150 words, to emotioninthemuseum@gmail.com by Thursday 12th December 2019. Queries can be addressed to the conference organisers Dr Geoff Cubitt and Dr Catherine Oakley via the email address above.