Description
The discipline of international relations has traditionally ‘under-appreciated’ museums (Van Veeren 2020), despite their role in performing global politics (Welland 2017; Lisle 2006). War museum exhibitions enact the social ordering of national cultural heritage, often sanitising the moral messiness and dark cruelty of war due to their role as shared educational spaces. Much of the critical work on museums and war focuses attention on the exhibitions’ objects and the surrounding discourses that give them meaning (Lisle 2006). We shift attention to visitor responses and reflections from curatorial and exhibition museum workers. Our study uses a ‘walking the museum’ (Thobo-Carlsen 2016) and focus group approach to examine how three different groups (British military veterans who had served in Northern Ireland, Irish community members in Manchester, and politics and history students from Salford University) engaged with the ‘Northern Ireland: Living with the Troubles’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (London and Salford, 2023-2024).
The exhibition offered an innovative approach, presenting contested narratives side by side, and with explicit curator notes on why certain events or stories were chosen. In this paper, we discuss how a ‘dialogical approach’ (Caddick et al. 2019), that privileges sociability and affective encounters in the interpretation of the museum’s visual culture, not only provides insights into the museum’s representational and commemorative practices, but also values the everyday expertise that each group brings to the exhibition and their collaborative sense-making through reflections and storytelling.
