Browsing by Person "Wallen, Linnea"

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The Aftermaths of Participation: Outcomes and Consequences of Participatory Work with Forced Migrants in Museums (Book Review)
(Berghahn Journals, 2023-12-01) Wallen, Linnea
Caring spaces: Individual and social wellbeing in museum community engagement experiences
(Taylor & Francis, 2022-03-09) Wallen, Linnea; Docherty-Hughes, John R.
This paper explores the narratives of participants in museum community engagement projects in Scotland. Emphasis is placed on how taking part in museum community engagement projects can have a positive impact on the participants’ wellbeing. This qualitative study employed a dialogical research strategy, which involved careful and mindful choreography of the context and space within which interactions between researcher and participants emerged. Semi-structured walking interviews with five participants were conducted in the summer of 2019 at two museums in Glasgow: Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and The Lighthouse. All participants had taken part in at least one museum community engagement project in Glasgow. Participants’ narratives reveal the positive impacts that “caring spaces” engendered through museum community engagement work have on overall feelings of wellbeing, achieved through deep processes of critical reflection, which resulted in enhanced self-esteem and confidence, and a heightened awareness of participants’ situated ontology in the context of broader issues of social inequality and identities. Museum community engagement projects, when practiced and experienced as “spaces of care,” have a critical role in enhancing individual and social wellbeing amongst participants themselves, particularly in terms of identifying long-term educational and self-worth legacies.
Leaving or Staying “Home” in a Time of Rupture: International Students’ Experiences of Loneliness and Social Isolation during COVID-19
(2024-01-04) Wallen, Linnea; Sagan, Olivia; Scally-Robertson, Mhairi
During COVID-19, international students were faced with the decision of remaining in their country of study or returning to their home countries, with little knowledge of when they would next be able to return or leave. Both choices left the students vulnerable to feelings of loneliness and social isolation. This paper examines how international students at a Scottish university experienced and navigated leaving or staying “home” and how loneliness and social isolation characterised these experiences. We further contextualise these experiences through Holbraad et al.’s (2019) prism of “rupture”. The data were generated between February-July 2021 through semi-structured focus groups and qualitative questionnaire comments and were analysed through Thematic Analysis. We discuss three themes: 1) Liminal Friends and Strangers, 2) Sense of Home and Family, and 3) Staying or Leaving the Country. The study contributes to the expanding body of research on experiences of loneliness and social isolation amongst international students.
MEMORY AND MUSEUM COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
(Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2024-12-11) Wallen, Linnea
In the past two decades, numerous scholars have highlighted the value of engagement with memory in museum projects. However, what memory – a complex and multifaceted concept – actually refers to in such projects has previously not been investigated in depth. In this thesis, I explore how memory is used, understood and conceptualised in museum community engagement activities in Scotland. Adopting a multiple instrumental case study approach underpinned by the theoretical perspectives of bricolage, hermeneutic phenomenology and practice theory, I examine the memory work in community engagement projects at three museums: The Scottish Crannog Centre, The Devil’s Porridge Museum and The Open Museum. The proximity to living memory varies significantly across the projects – from prehistory, to the First World War, to present day autobiographical memories – and through this variety I expose the nuanced and disparate memory work in the different museum contexts. I examine how the work is shaped by sectoral, institutional and project infrastructures that make certain kinds of participatory and collaborative community engagement practice (im-)possible. Through a combination of interviews, observations and document analysis analysed through reflexive thematic analysis, I critically discuss what memory work looks like and how it is achieved, accounting for museum practitioners’ and project participants’ understandings of what memory ‘is’, where it exists and how they work with it. I present the key findings as three conceptual theses: 1) The Constitution of Memory and Memory Work in Museum Community Engagement; 2) Caring For and About Memory; and, 3) Problematisation as Product and Process. In offering a multiplicitious conceptualisation of memory and critical engagement with the factors that shape memory work, I propose a refined understanding of the meaning, impact and processes of memory work in museum community engagement spaces.
Museum Studies
(Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2023-09-20) Wallen, Linnea; Lucas M. Bietti,; Martin Pogacar
The term “museum studies” came into use in the late 1960s and early 1970s predominately in English-speaking countries, whereas the older term “museology” is more commonly used worldwide. Over the past few decades, it has developed into a broad, yet distinct, area of study and its continuously expanding knowledge base consists of a wide range of specialized and generalized journals, books, and textbooks. There is an extensive body of work addressing the relationship between museums and memory, particularly in museums’ role in memory production. For example, such work has focused on the role of museum institutions in knowledge construction, the use of museum collections in prompting memories, and how visitors engage with museum exhibitions.
Uncertainty as Affective State and Critical Engagement Strategy in Museum and Heritage Site Settings
(University of California Press, 2023-03-16) Wallen, Linnea; Docherty-Hughes, John R.
Some pasts have long been uncertain—among those, prehistoric lives in areas where limited archaeological evidence has been unearthed. The Scottish Crannog Centre holds a collection of Iron Age artifacts that have been excavated from the bottom of Loch Tay, jigsaw pieces that are used to tell the story of the everyday lives of crannog dwellers two and a half thousand years ago. The visitor experience at the museum is built on direct interaction with the museum team as the visitors are guided through the site, presenting ample opportunities for critical questions to be raised and discussed about how the past can be understood in the present and how it can inform the future. Facilitating such conversations—and using Iron Age artifacts as points of connection and as conversational prompts—involves a careful balance between fact, interpretation, and imagination; what we know for certain, what is likely, and what we do not, and cannot, know. This paper focuses on how Scottish Crannog Centre museum practitioners employ uncertainty as a feeling, a process, and an engagement strategy in generating critical reflections and conversations among visitors. Drawing on data generated through twenty-five interviews with museum staff, apprentices, and volunteers, as well as ethnographic observations, we explore how the team manages uncertainty, how it is positioned and functions in interactions with visitors, and how uncertainty facilitates a sense of connection to the distant past. In so doing, we argue that uncertainty can be more clearly conceptualized as an affective state and a critical strategy when exploring how prehistoric and present-day life are connected in museum contexts.
Unpacking the complexities, challenges, and nuances of museum community engagement practitioners' narratives on knowledge production in Scotland
(2024-02-02) Wallen, Linnea; Docherty‐Hughes, John R.; Darling, Stephen
This paper explores how community engagement practitioners understand their knowledge production work in facilitating and choreographing dialogical spaces (Freire, 2005) within which “organic intellectuals” (Gramsci, 1971) and “alternative” knowledge emerge. Using a qualitative, phenomenological research strategy, data were generated through semi‐structured interviews with community engagement practitioners in Scotland. Practitioners emphasize the importance of equity in the relationship with project participants in knowledge production. Practitioners' narratives reveal how those relationships are realized and how these inform their own and the museum institutions' practice. We acknowledge that community‐based project participants' expertise is prioritized by practitioners as critical to effective community engagement. We argue for a nuanced conceptualization—and appreciation—of the complexities inherent in museum community engagement practice, which is often absent in museum studies work. This conceptualization is embedded in practitioners' subjective experiences and reflections, as well as structural contexts, which simultaneously enable and constrain meaningful community engagement work.