People on the move: how museums de-marginalize migration

Social Semiotics, vol. 30, pp. 607–624

Abstract

Newly set-up social heritage museums have attempted to counter the anonymous and stereotyped presentations of migrants in the public sphere. Drawing on the tension between media and museum representations of human mobility, this paper offers a multimodal analysis of de-marginalization strategies in museum discourses of migration. We argue that in contrast to contemporary news media and their predominantly “exclusionary” discourse (Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou, and Wodak Citation2018. “The Mediatization and the Politicization of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe.” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16 (1-2): 1–14), museums portray (e)migration enthusiastically, with varying degrees of sophistication, with strategies to generate involvement, empathy, and pleasurable experience. Historical actors and events are thereby stretched as well as compressed and essentialized into a phenomenon of people of all times everywhere. In this process of de-marginalization, however, museums and visitors also pay a price of differentiation and authenticity. We suggest that this mainly happens under the pressure of neoliberal economic conditions and the exigencies of the experience economy.

Authors 2

1. Katja Pelsmaekers corresponding

   University of Antwerp

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Professional and Academic Communication, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

2. Tom Van Hout Aachen

   Leiden University · University of Antwerp

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute for Professional and Academic Communication, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

   Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University, The Netherlands