Paper short abstract

How can multimodal ethnography create dialogue in polarized museum debates? I present a methodological approach using a collaborative online exchange exhibition that links museum communities in Barbados and Cologne (Germany), tracing affective resonances, frictions, and emerging relations.

Paper long abstract

Polarised debates on decolonisation and heritage often harden into mutually exclusive moral positions, where “rational” institutional authority is set against “emotional” demands for repair, recognition, and belonging. This paper asks how multimodal, collaborative ethnography can open a shared space in which different affective publics can encounter each other with dialogue. Drawing on my ongoing PhD research in Barbados and Cologne, I analyse the making of a collaborative online exchange exhibition as both method and ethnographic object.

The exhibition is co-developed through workshops and iterative curatorial choices with museum-affiliated communities in Barbados and Cologne. Participants respond to selected artifacts, exhibitions, and themes through short narratives, images, audio fragments, and “affective mappings” of museum encounters. By circulating the same prompts across two historically entangled yet different postcolonial contexts, the project makes visible how affects “stick” (Ahmed 2004) differently to museums, collections, and institutional roles, producing divergent claims and senses of belonging.

I argue that the exchange exhibition operates as an affective infrastructure that does more than represent difference: it actively reconfigures relations between publics. It makes tensions, attachments, and silences experientially perceptible, enables dialogic encounters without forcing consensus, and reveals both the possibilities and constraints of institutional collaboration. In doing so, it demonstrates how multimodal ethnography can function as a method of inquiry, a space of encounter, and a modest intervention in polarized museum debates.