Save the date for our Museums and Memory Working Group Roundtable on Narratives and Emotions in Museums to be held on July 11, 5-7pm CET/11am-1pm EST.

The work of engaging pasts (traumatic or other) in the museum raises questions around the role of affect/emotion in museum exhibits and the implications of narrative as both form and strategy. Many museums, particularly those focused on historical violence, seek to evoke emotional responses in visitors, raising a number of questions about the intersection of narrative and emotion. For example, what role does emotion play in storytelling and the work that museums are attempting to do? What kinds of narrative strategies are used to evoke emotion and affect? How might the display strategies and narratives in museums mobilize the affective power of memory towards progressive political ends—and should they? How might museums elicit emotion in ways that resist facile identification with victims on the one hand, and re-traumatization or voyeurism on the other, and what role does narrative play in this process? What happens when museums evoke unintended emotional responses? This roundtable will address these and other questions through a number of case studies, including museums in Europe, the US, and Japan.

Panelists: Jenny Woodley (Nottingham Trent University), Ljiljana Radonić (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Jazmine Contreras (Goucher College), Joyce Apsel (NYU), Stephan Jaeger (University of Manitoba)