
Rachael Coghlan is the CEO of Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre. For nearly 20 years, Rachael Coghlan has worked in leadership positions in national cultural institutions in Australia’s museum sector, shaping the full continuum of visitor engagement from audience development, exhibitions and events, to digital and external communications. Rachael is passionate about how museums can continue to develop and was recently curator and executive producer for an experimental exhibition, Power of 1: Does your voice count? at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House. This project trialled new approaches to audience engagement, applying ideas and practice proposed by Nina Simon’s influential book The Participatory Museum (2010). The Power of 1 exhibition is now the subject of a research case study which examines whether the rhetoric of museum participation is meeting its aims. Interviews with visitors reveal perceptions of the participatory exhibition experience as well as reflections on the state of Australian democracy. This data is complemented by longitudinal visitor research, observations, and interviews with museum professionals. Rachael is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Museum and Heritage Studies at the Australian National University. Her research interests and methodology explore opportunities to democratise the museum experience using an interpretivist research lens which genuinely recognises the agency of the visitor.
Sessions in which Rachael Coghlan participates
9:00
9:00
- 10.00 Digital vs Tangible: How Museum Visitors Experience Participation and What It Means to Them
- Participant Rachael Coghlan (Australian National University) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Envisioning the Dialogic Museum through Digital Interventions
- Paper
9:00
9:00
Sessions in which Rachael Coghlan attends
17:00
17:00
- Opening Ceremony and Cocktail
- Signup required Concordia, Grey Nuns Motherhouse (GN) - Former Chapel
- 17:00 - 19:30 | 2 hours 30 minutes
- Cocktail
19:30
19:30
- The Garden of the Grey Nuns / Le jardin des sœurs grises Concordia, Grey Nuns Motherhouse (GN) - GN 1210
- 19:30 - 21:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
- Research-Creation
9:00
9:00
- Keynote : What does heritage change? Le patrimoine, ça change quoi? (Lucie K. Morisset)
- Signup required UQAM, pavillon Judith-Jasmin (J) - Salle Alfred-Laliberté
- 9:00 - 10:00 | 1 hour
- Keynote with simultaneous translation / Conférence avec traduction simultanée

10:30
10:30
- Break | Pause UQAM, pavillon J.-A. De Sève (DS) - DS Ground Floor Hall
- 10:30 - 11:00 | 30 minutes
- Pause
11:00
11:00
- 11.00 Mixing Memory and Desire: Utopian Currents in Heritage
- Participant Ms Elizabeth Stainforth (University of Leeds, History of Art and Cultural Studies, United Kingdom ) |
- 11:00 - 11:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Heritage Futures / Utopian Currents I
- Paper
- 11.40 They Who Debate the Past Debate the Future
- Participant Dr Helen Graham (University of Leeds) |
- 11:00 - 11:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Heritage Futures / Utopian Currents I
- Paper
- 13.50 Heritage Ontologies: Understanding Heritage as Future-Making Practices
- Participant Rodney Harrison (University College London) |
- 11:00 - 11:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Heritage Futures / Utopian Currents I
- Paper
- 13.30 Perspectives on Past and Future in Present Tyneside
- Participant Leonie Wieser (Northumbria University) |
- 11:00 - 11:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Heritage Futures / Utopian Currents I
- Paper
- 11.20 Quotidian Utopia: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence and the Doctrine of Heritage Significance
- Participant Prof. Tracy Ireland |
- 11:00 - 11:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Heritage Futures / Utopian Currents I
- Paper
- Heritage Futures / Utopian Currents I UQAM, pavillon J.-A. De Sève (DS) - DS-R515
- 11:00 - 17:00 | 6 hours
- Regular session
- 14.30 Of, By, and For Which People?: Government and Contested Heritage
- Participant Prof. Elizabeth Kryder-Reid (Indiana University (IUPUI)) |
- 11:00 - 11:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Cultural Contestation: Politics and Governance of Heritage
- Paper
12:30
12:30
- Lunchboxes | Boîtes à lunch UQAM, pavillon J.-A. De Sève (DS) - DS Ground Floor Hall
- 12:30 - 13:30 | 1 hour
- Repas
13:30
13:30
- 13.30 "Nostalgia for the Future": Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Class
- Participant Prof. Laurajane Smith (Australian National University) |
- 13:30 - 14:00 | 30 minutes Part of: Cultural Heritage and the Working Class
- Paper
- Cultural Heritage and the Working Class UQAM, pavillon J.-A. De Sève (DS) - DS-1540
- 13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
- Regular session
18:30
18:30
- Keynote: Is Tangible to Intangible as Formal is to Informal ? (Michael Herzfeld)
- Signup required UQAM, pavillon Judith-Jasmin (J) - Salle Alfred-Laliberté
- 18:30 - 20:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
- Keynote with simultaneous translation / Conférence avec traduction simultanée

9:00
9:00
- 10.00 Digital vs Tangible: How Museum Visitors Experience Participation and What It Means to Them
- Participant Rachael Coghlan (Australian National University) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Envisioning the Dialogic Museum through Digital Interventions
- Paper
- 09.30 Documentaires et dialogues citoyens : des « artéfacts » au coeur de l'exposition muséale. L'expérience du Centre d'histoire de Montréal
- Participant Catherine Charlebois (Centre d'histoire de Montréal) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Envisioning the Dialogic Museum through Digital Interventions
- Paper
- 11.30 Roundtable Q&A with All Speakers
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Envisioning the Dialogic Museum through Digital Interventions
- 09.00 Reflecting the "Other": Digital Museum Installations as Sites of Dialogue
- Participant Prof. Rhiannon Mason | Participant Dr Areti Galani (Newcastle University, UK) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Envisioning the Dialogic Museum through Digital Interventions
- Paper
- 11.00 To and from Youth: Co-producing a Learning Program on Digital Democracy with Youths
- Participant Torhild Skåtun (Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology ) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Envisioning the Dialogic Museum through Digital Interventions
- Paper
9:00
9:00
- 09.10 “Home is the Streets”: Collaborative Cultural Heritage Work with Contemporary Homeless People and its Function as Advocacy
- Participant Rachael Kiddey (Independent Social Research Foundation) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: “For People Then and for People Now”: Approaches to Heritage and Shared Authority
- Paper
- 10.00 Challenging the Hegemony of European Holocaust Memory: A Study of Different Approaches to Representing Difficult Heritage in Europe, Asia and North America
- Participant Sandra Sulamith Graefenstein (ANU) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Challenging a Discourse of Difference: Heritage in Asia and Europe
- Paper
- 10.00 Authentic Kyrgyzstan: Top-Down Politics Meet Bottom-Up Heritage
- Participant Anne Pyburn (Indiana University) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: “For People Then and for People Now”: Approaches to Heritage and Shared Authority
- Paper
- “For People Then and for People Now”: Approaches to Heritage and Shared Authority Concordia, John Molson School of Business Building (MB) - MB S1.115
- 9:00 - 15:00 | 6 hours
- Regular session
- Empathy and Indifference – Emotional/Affective Routes To and Away from Compassion II Concordia, John Molson School of Business Building (MB) - MB 3.435
- 9:00 - 12:30 | 3 hours 30 minutes
- Regular session
- 09.30 The Legacy of Communism: Difficult Histories and Contested Narratives in Romania
- Participant Dr Sheila Watson (University of Leicester) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: “For People Then and for People Now”: Approaches to Heritage and Shared Authority
- Paper
- 16.30 The Silk Roads or Economic Belt: An Analysis of the Interaction Between China’s World Heritage and its Economic and Political Ambitions
- Participant Jieyi Xie (Australian National University) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: Heritage Shifts in East Asia: Communication between Global Policies and Local Practices
- Paper
- 11.30 Toward Participatory Development of Museum Performance Indicators: A Means of Embedding "Shared Authority"? Experiences from Aotearoa, New Zealand
- Participant Dr Jane A. Legget (Auckland War Memorial Museum) |
- 9:00 - 9:30 | 30 minutes Part of: “For People Then and for People Now”: Approaches to Heritage and Shared Authority
- Paper
13:30
13:30
- (in)significance: Values and Valuing in Heritage Concordia, John Molson School of Business Building (MB) - MB 2.430
- 13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
- Roundtable
15:30
15:30
- Critical Heritage Studies in the UK: Future Directions Concordia, John Molson School of Business Building (MB) - MB 5.215
- 15:30 - 17:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
- Roundtable