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Article published In:
Narrative Inquiry
Vol. 31:2 (2021) ► pp.287–310

Narrative affordances

Audience participation in museum narration in two history museums

ORCID logo | Bar Ilan University

Museums offer rich material environments for studying narration as jointly accomplished by institutions and audiences. Following the narrative and participatory turns museums have taken, the research explores the narrative actions audiences’ texts perform vis-à-vis museums’ narrations. It examines audience participation in two history museums, as elicited by response vehicles – onsite media that serve to invite and capture audience written responses. The research argues that museum response vehicles offer narrative affordances and entitlements, which shape how audiences negotiate participation as publicly documented and displayed. Comparative findings indicate that participation is shaped by response vehicles’ spatio-material affordances, including how brief textual segments function as audience-based contributions in and to the historical narration. A range of audience-generated narrative actions, entitlements, and speech acts are discerned and discussed, which typically conform with, but sometimes ‘override’, museums’ affordances. These narrative actions shed light on the mechanics, politics and policies of public narration and agency.

Keywords: affordances, materiality, media, museums, museum audience, institutions, participation, communicative entitlements, visitor studies, language and social interaction
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Response vehicles in the Florida Holocaust Museum and the Ammunition Hill National Memorial Museum
  • Researching museums
  • Closing gestures and participatory narrative entitlements
    • Closing gestures at the FHM
      • “My Holocaust Experience was Great!”: Evaluating experience
      • “I vow to never again sit by”: Commissive and directive speech acts
      • “America is an angry place today”: Critical evaluations
      • “I witnessed the Kristalnacht”: Biographical anecdotes and personal connection to the Holocaust
    • Closing gestures at the AHNMM
      • “To the fallen brothers in arms. [I am] saluting you”: Writing as action in the commemorative narration
      • “It was very moving”: Evaluating the museum visit
      • “Enough already”: Critical and polemic evaluations
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.19121.noy
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