Welcome to a seminar with Pille Pruulmann Vengerfeldt, Professor of Media and Communication Studies K3. The title of the seminar is:

Visitors, users and audiences – modes of engagement for diverse audiences in museum communication?

It will be held at Wednesday, December 13 at 10.15-12.00 in room NIC 0541 (K3 Open Studio), Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

In this seminar, I would like to discuss the potential of descriptive and prescriptive analytical frameworks to evaluate museum communication. Museums are targeted by a number of large societal changes like digitalization of cultural heritage, attention economy where museums are increasingly expected to “earn their keep”, but also challenges on truthfulness, authority and democratization of knowledge. Different researchers have approached museum participation (Simon, 2010) or museum engagement (Lotina, 2016) from a diversity of angles, some from more normative perspectives than others. At the same time, museums are grappling with these challenges the best they can, often with little or no analytical support. Visitor studies paradigm takes a very instrumental and functionalist approach to learning, resembling more media effects studies paradigm that is often criticized by more contextual and critical media studies. I am hoping to discuss with interested colleagues a research proposal idea that would help to develop in practice an analytical framework of museum people which would use the advances of media and audience studies and contextualise those for museums, but also add to specific knowledge in museum studies area. The framework could be used to understand what museums offer for diverse audiences and how can different modes of engagement be meaningfully used to facilitate museums to diverse audiences.