[Commlist] New Book: Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums. Exhibition and Exposure in France and Germany

New Book: Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums. Exhibition 
and Exposure in France and Germany
Submitted by Yannik Porsché on Thu, 02/21/2019 - 18:35
News author
Yannik Porsche

Porsché, Yannik (2018) Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums. 
Exhibition and Exposure in France and Germany, Basingstoke: Palgrave 
Macmillan. https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319663562, download 
from: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-66357-9

This book offers an interactionist perspective on theories of public 
representation, knowledge and immigration in museum institutions. 
Examining how a Franco-German museum exhibition represents immigrants 
and exposes public stereotypes, the analysis follows the process of the 
production and reception of the exhibition as it travelled from Paris to 
Berlin. The author proposes a microsociological contextualisation 
analysis integrating discourse analysis and ethnography to compare 
formats of museum work, social interaction in the exhibition and mass 
media debates. Visitor reception of the different exhibition versions 
reveals the symbolic nature of interactions in museums, for example 
concerning conflicting political voices and accusations of censorship. 
Depending on the institutional context, interactions in the museums are 
geared towards securing immigrants a place in national collective 
memory, towards carrying out debate on integration, or providing 
opportunities for personal encounters and reflection beyond national 
categorisation. This book will appeal to students and researchers 
interested in work on the intersection of sociology, cultural studies, 
and discursive psychology, in methods of discourse analysis and 
ethnography; and to practitioners working in museums.

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Endorsements:

“What do people do in museums? Surrounded by exhibits, speaking to 
tour-guides or reading a catalogue and press reviews, they engage in 
meaning-making practices. This study of a French-German exhibition makes 
a powerful case for combining interaction analysis and ethnography in 
order to carry out empirically and theoretically insightful research on 
public discourse – a must-read for students and researchers interested 
in qualitative approaches to Discourse Studies.” (Professor Johannes 
Angermuller, Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, UK) 
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“Through three museums presenting the same-but-very-different exhibition 
on immigration, Yannik Porsché guides us on a fascinating journey from 
Paris to Berlin. The museum institutions not only produce 
representations of immigrants, but also tell us a great deal about those 
who do the representing. This study shows how, as epistemic spaces, 
museums orchestrate and discipline discourse about their objects. 
Moreover, it reveals how, as interactional spaces, they – sometimes 
unwillingly – enable other voices and bodies to speak through and in 
them. An important book!” (Professor Lorenza Mondada, Chair of general 
linguistics and French linguistics, University of Basel, Switzerland) 
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“In this highly original comparative study, Yannik Porsché opens a 
mysterious black box: that of the institutional epistemics of how 
museums construct knowledge. The study is a much needed corrective to 
our understanding of museums as a neutral storage space for collective 
memories—and a fantastic extension of the notion of epistemic cultures 
to the productive space at the intersection of the museum, the media and 
science.” (Professor Karin Knorr Cetina, Chair of the Department of 
Sociology, University of Chicago, USA)
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