Research

Cultural heritage, social cohesion, and identity are intertwined in many ways. They can strengthen the sense of belonging but also may involve othering and exclusion. These can be accompanied by strong emotions. Cultural heritage is not isolated from the rest of society, but has meanings both in people's everyday lives and in (cultural) policy debates. As societies become more diverse, the meanings and interpretations of cultural heritage are also becoming increasingly politicised.

Cultural heritage has been set the goal of building social cohesion. In this project, we examine the main cultural heritage institution, the museum, and consider how the objective of social cohesion is reflected in their collection work. We look at museums' collection work as an arena and a tool for socio-political emotional labour, from the perspective of both museum professionals and museum audiences.

We do museum ethnography and study of institutional museum practices. Our research material will consist of interviews of museum professionals and museum audiences, written responses to themed, open-ended questionnaire, and ethnographic observation. Our research method is practice-oriented affective ethnography, which allows us to explore emotions and create an understanding of the phenomenon we are studying. We treat cultural heritage as a process, driven by the emotions and values associated with it.

Our research questions are:

• What role do cultural heritage institutions play in identifying, challenging, and supporting affective practices related to cultural heritage?
• What emotions do collections and collection work evoke in museum professionals, and what kind of emotional work is related to museum collections?
• What emotions do collections evoke in different museum audiences, and how can collection work strengthen experiences of inclusion or exclusion?