In Search of Heterotopia: Immersive Experiences in the Museum

Museums everywhere are waging battle to find ways to attract new audience members. In this thesis I draw upon participant observation, interviews, and event planning in order to examine how museums create heterotopic, interactive immersive experiences. I focus on the work of two Seattle-area museums, and a gallery and a museum in Ellensburg. The Entertainment, Music, and Popular Culture museum (EMP), the Nordic Heritage Museum (NHM), and the Museum of Culture and Environment (MCE) developed opportunities for visitors to engage with museum-created heterotopic events. I approach this analysis through a theoretical framework that emphasizes structure and agency. On one hand, visitors feel empowered to create their own experiences through imagination, heterotopic flow, and seductive narrative. On the other hand, visitors, especially white visitors, may unconsciously reproduce assumptions about race, class, and age embedded in accounts of “the Other” distanced from themselves in time and space.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science (MS)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Resource Management

Year dc:date.available

2016

Author dc:creator

• Crosby, Nicolas

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mark Auslander
• Jessica Hope Amason
• Kathleen Barlow

• Museum Studies
• Play Theory
• Race
• Young Adults
• Relevance
• Visitor Studies
• Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
• Theatre and Performance Studies

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/etd/595

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.cwu.edu:etd-1598