Visitor dialogue and participation as knowledge generating practices in exhibition work: What can museum experts learn from it?

Abstract

“Dialogue” and “visitor participation” are important concepts in the discourse of museums and the public in today’s museology. This chapter follows the initial phase of an interdisciplinary exhibition project on archaeology and natural history at the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim, which took place in an experimental space in the museum named “The Laboratory”. Not only a space for engaging in dialogue with visitors, “The Laboratory” was supposed to work as a means to do research on the museum workers themselves to ensure a socially robust exhibition in the end. However, the strength of a more established discourse of museum education and exhibition making soon became apparent in a series of organisational obstacles. Working with “The Laboratory” revealed weaknesses in the imagining of a homogenous “we” among the museum staff, as well as a need to emphasise how science communication is a fundamental element of the production of scientific knowledge, rather than an add-on in the end of the process of knowledge production. The true lesson to be learnt was that the change of keywords in science communication in museums, from “deficit” to “dialogue” and “visitor participation”, does not necessarily reflect an actual change in academic and political habits-of-thoughts and practices ‒ or as new ways of doing things at the museum.