Museum ethnography
Researching punishment museums as environments of narrativity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5151965 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hannah Thurston (0000-0002-0323-3809, University of Brighton, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 205979911772061 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Methodological Innovations (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2059-7991 • E-ISSN: 2059-7991 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/2059799117720615 |
| OpenAlex | W2753077530 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 30 |
Like all museums, punishment museums and sites of penal tourism are inherently political and moral institutions, offering cultural memories of a collective past. As environments of narrativity, these are significant spaces in which the public 'learn' about the past and how it continues to inform the present. In line with recent studies about 'dark' tourist sites, this article argues that the crime/punishment museum and jail cell tour can - and should - be understood as an ethnographic opportunity for narrative analysis. Rather than focus on just the findings of such an analysis, this article seeks to provide a practical guide to data collection and analysis in the context of criminological museum research. Offering illustrative examples from a study of Texan sites of penal tourism, it demonstrates how the history of punishment - as represented in museums - is an important part of cultural identity more broadly, playing a significant role in how we conceptualise (in)justice, morality and the purpose of punishment. In short, this article discusses how we can evoke the ethnographic tradition within museum spaces in order to interrogate how crime and punishment are expressed through narratives, images, objects and symbols
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology · Criminal justice · Criminology · Ethnography · Folklore · Heritage tourism · Identity (music · Literature · Media studies · Morality · Narrative · Narrativity · Political science · Politics · Punishment (psychology · Sociology · Tourism · Tourism geography · Anthropology · Archaeological Research and Protection · History · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology · Social Psychology
Museums and the making of ourselves
The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography
Public Executions
Doing Qualitative Research Differently
Using Narrative in Social Research
Interpretation of the Unimaginable
Tales of the Field
The polysemy of punishment memorialization
The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism
Prison
Branding Texas
Models of Narrative Analysis
Unlocking the Gates
The Culture of Punishment
Staged authenticity in penal history sites across Canada
Penal tourism in Argentina
Critical Punishment Memorialization in Canada
Experiential Cultural Tourism
The narratives of offenders
Remembering and Forgetting
Autoethnography and Emotion as Intellectual Resources
The Aesthetics of Qualitative (Re)search
| Citations per year | 1.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |