Reflecting on the Mobile Contact Zone: Cultural Diplomacy, Touring Exhibitions and Intercultural Heritage Experiences
My Session Status
This session explores international touring exhibitions as mobile “contact zones” which undergo processes of transformation and reconstruction as they traverse contested museological, cultural and political terrains. This approach highlights their nature as dynamic sites of encounter, performance and interpretation. We also examine how the mobile contact zone is experienced by the actors involved, both heritage professionals and visitors. Responding to the main conference theme, an overall question that the session addresses is: what do international touring exhibitions, and the intercultural heritage experiences they facilitate, change? Do they help in developing intercultural understanding, facilitating dialogue and building bridges between cultures?
We invite papers that explore these questions, with a particular emphasis on gathering in-depth empirical evidence from multiple sources and perspectives of exactly what touring exhibitions do change, and how. Our interest is in building a theoretical understanding of international touring exhibitions, as well as critiquing the role of museums in cultural diplomacy and the development of a transnational, intercultural museum practice.
Related conference sub-themes include: the role of heritage in globalization and transnational processes, particularly its circulation and mobility through touring exhibitions; the "uses" of heritage in terms of tourism (the international blockbuster as tourist attraction), national identity-making and "imagined communities" as constructed through such exhibitions and utilized for cultural diplomacy. Through detailed investigation of these processes and possibilities, this session will attempt to gain a deeper understanding of their implications for intercultural heritage experiences and for the creation of touring exhibitions that fulfil their potential as spaces in which power, identity and notions of civility are performed and explored in open-minded, reflexive and constructive ways.
Sub Sessions
Key motivations for touring exhibitions from major museums include enhancing international reputations, sharing expertise, and strengthening institutional partnerships. Few studies, however, have examined the complex processes involved when culture “goes on tour” in the form of a museum exhibition, and how it functions as a site of intercultural heritage experiences and practices. This paper will explore the experiences of museum professionals involved in a touring exhibition from...
Museums produce international touring exhibitions to connect with international audiences and, in turn, host them to make globally significant cultural heritage available to local visitors. On the one hand, these exhibitions are promoted for their potential to advance cultural diplomacy and intercultural understanding; on the other, they have been critiqued as politically safe forms of national self-promotion that narrow our view of a nation or culture, rather than expanding or deepening i...
In the museum and cultural world, and also from the point of view of cultural diplomacy, international touring exhibitions have been taken for granted as a way to promote and enhance intercultural understanding, bringing together people, objects and stories from across political, cultural, and geographical borders. Nevertheless, very few studies have empirically investigated this complex process and the way in which the staff from different institutional contexts work together to produce i...
The history of the Maoris' cultural appropriation of museums has been documented, but the effects of the reception of Maori touring exhibitions are still hypothesis. This comparative study is part of “the first in depth empirical evidence of exactly what touring exhibitions do change, and how.” It will produce grounded elements and reflexive insights into one of the two touring exhibitions examined in the session: “E Tū Ake. Standing strong.” This paper will focus on the effects of the Mao...
