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Paper short abstract

This paper engages with the biopolitics of disability to examine how health is articulated and communicated as an ever-expanding field of intervention through museum narratives and fictional scenarios in 'Museums of the Future'.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents a comparative ethnography of two ‘Museums of the Future’ in Germany that exhibit speculative scenarios of the future of health through gamified interactives, sensor-wearables, and immersive activities. The museums project a world facing crises, exhibiting environmental and health risks and their corresponding biomedical 'possibilities'. The museums’ interventions focus on the behaviours and bodies of the public, who face repeated injunctions to surveil, fix, and augment their bodies through increasingly invasive genomic and predictive medicines. I engage with the biopolitics of disability to examine how health is articulated and communicated as an ever-expanding field of intervention through museum narratives and fictional scenarios. I examine how sociotechnical visions and promises underpinning these datafied technologies are made legible through the first-person, gamified museum exhibits. That is, how abstract ideas of technology and society are materialised through objects and experiences and how people make sense and contest those ideas through interaction with artefacts. This is read in light of the institutionally specific form of the museum, its relationship to state and society, and the production of collective beliefs and individual subjectivities.

Keywords: datafication, surveillence, debility, cultural studies