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

Abstract

The Immigration Museum Melbourne, Australia, launched the Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours exhibition in 2011. Aimed primarily at secondary school students, this long-term installation seeks to foster reflection on identity and belonging, as well as dialogue about racism, through an interactive, immersive museum experience. This paper describes a multi-method research project, which included narrative interviews, focus groups and video diaries with 47 Year 11–12 students from three secondary schools in Victoria, Australia, and discusses each method's contribution to an overall empirical understanding of the installation's impact on students' experiences. Emerging findings suggest the ways in which the exhibition space supports students to encounter and engage with individual stories and experiences, thus moving beyond an abstract tolerance of cultural diversity by unsettling the self and destabilising stereotyped and prejudiced interpretations of the ‘other’. The paper concludes by discussing the potential for triangulated qualitative approaches to provide rich emic perspectives on multi-sensory exhibitions.

Keywords:

• Belonging
• Identity
• Intercultural Understanding
• Multi-sensory Museum Experiences
• Qualitative Research Methods
• Racism

Notes

[1] The fourth author attended two meetings as an academic adviser to this development, including providing feedback on the script for the tram simulation, which will be further introduced below.

[2] Throughout the research for this project, we use pseudonyms for the schools and students we interviewed. Any resemblance to schools with a similar name is coincidental.

[3] Please refer to http://museumvictoria.com.au/immigrationmuseum/discoverycentre/identity/

[4] The term ‘boat people’ is a derogatory term used in popular discourse to refer to asylum seekers and refugees who arrive in Australia by boat.

[5] The tram (electricity powered streetcar for public transportation) simulation is an audio-visual display during which students could listen to and watch an example of everyday racism from the perspectives of different people on a Melbourne tram.

[6] The Cronulla riots of 2005 occurred in Cronulla, a beachside suburb in Sydney and were the result of race-based violence between Anglo and Middle Eastern Australians.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage [grant number LP120100080], the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation and Museum Victoria. The first author is supported by a research fellowship from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, the third author by an Alfred Deakin Senior Research Fellowship from Deakin University and the last author holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship [grant number FT130101148].