Laura McAtackney (Oxford University; laura.mcatackney@conted.ox.ac.uk) and Alexandra Ward (Cardiff University; wardae@cardiff.ac.uk)

As cultural producers, museums and heritage sites construct particular readings, histories and representations from the materialities of the past. The act of interpretation is an inherently dynamic, complex practice and is embedded within wider cultural and socio-political processes relating to identity, time and memory, knowledge, ideology and worldviews. This applies throughout contemporary and historical contexts. In recent years, critiques of the representational process have highlighted both the communicative powers of museums and heritage sites and the active, creative agency of the audience/consumer – there is a need to complicate these relationships further. Whilst the interactions between the public, the professionals and the objects in an interpretative environment often highlight the public and national museum experience, there is a need to explore heritage representation on a broader level. This includes exploring how those individuals and communities who feel disenfranchaised from public and national museums represent their environment, lives and identities in often unfunded, local and community museums. It also wishes to examine how curatorial intentionality can be negotiated, subverted and contested by those audiences who they wish to represent.

This session seeks to explore the wider complexities of representation and interpretation; heritage consumption and subversion and how identities are negotiated, transmuted, contested and even politicised from a national to local context across the museum and heritage experience. It aims to reveal how the museum/heritage experience is an open-ended relationship that moves beyond the simple dynamic of producer and consumer and involves interaction, negotiation, acceptance and rejection. We hope that this session will bring together researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds who favour an interdisciplinary approach that is both theoretically nuanced and rich in case-studies. We welcome papers from a wide range of research interests and cultural perspectives.