‘A little more courageous’: cultural recognition and histories of migration and diversity at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne

ABSTRACT

The Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia illustrates the increasing attention to working for social change and cultural recognition in museums throughout the world; its exhibitions are structured to move visitors towards understanding of and positive regard for cultural difference. There are, however, two distinct ‘phases’ or approaches to working towards what Fraser describes as recognitive justice in the Museum. Early exhibitions emphasised narratives of individual experience, humanising migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers through a sense of ‘connection’, while the most recent permanent exhibition, Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours, confronts visitors with a much more openly anti-racist stance. This paper argues that this recent exhibition represents a shift to a more unapologetically ‘activist’ role for the Immigration Museum, which has implications for the kind of cultural recognition sought.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum studies
• migration
• cultural recognition
• difference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Amy McKernan is a lecturer and researcher in equity and social justice in education, with particular expertise in the role that representations of social trauma and historical injustice can play in teaching for social inclusion and cultural recognition. Her work examines learning in public spaces, including museums and other cultural heritage organisations, and her current research investigates the place of learning with confronting history in values education.

ORCID

Amy McKernan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2776-9082

Notes

1 This was evident in comments on the online version of the scenario: “Who’s next door?” Immigration Museum, accessed June 12, 2014, https://museumvictoria.com.au/immigrationmuseum/discoverycentre/identity/people-like-them/whos-next-door/; and also acknowledged by McFadzean in her interview.