Making Memory, Making Meaning: Memorial Museums and the Participatory Audience

<p>This dissertation explores the relationship between memorial museums and visitors, reexamining the process of remembering traumatic events in United States history. My work examines this meaning-making dynamic in case studies of four memorial museums: The 9/11 Memorial Museum, The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, Manzanar National Historic Site, and Carthage Jail. By combining textual analysis of museums with data from visitor-produced materials such as guestbooks, letters, periodicals, and Instagram posts, I examine memorial museums' aims and rhetorical strategies while analyzing visitors' roles and contributions, illustrating how both guest and site collaborate to create memory and meaning. Drawing and building upon cultural studies, museum studies, and memory studies, this dissertation expands our understanding of participation at memorial museums, engagement with traumatic pasts, and the ways in which museums and audiences negotiate meaning. My particular focus on visitor participation illustrates how audiences exercise agency and contribute to the interpretive process at this complex museum genre.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Cultural Studies, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Arts and Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2020

Author dc:creator

• Kirkham, Hillary

Contributors dc:contributor

• Eve Oishi
• Janet Farrell Brodie

• Memorial museums
• Memorialization
• Memory studies
• Trauma
• American Studies
• Museum Studies

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/686

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1708