Times of great uncertainty reshape the meaning-making process in museums. Using ethnographic research methods inside museums from Bucharest to understand the political framework of this process could bring to the fore the toolkits through which this process takes place.
Paper long abstract:
Meaning-making is a fluid process influenced by social and cultural factors. In times of great doubt, how the ones we live right now are, encountering a global energetic crisis and the echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic, museums could not remain unruffled. This paper aims to investigate how public and private museums from Bucharest, Romania, deal with resource scarcity. Furthermore, it seeks to investigate which are the ideologies that decide which material objects are worth being exposed and which should be desacralised and rendered as insignificant. I will use participant observation inside the museums, discourse analysis, and qualitative research to take a gander at the political framework that creates meaning inside the museums. Furthermore, I will integrate it into a larger regional tradition, considering the social history of these institutions in the late capitalism of Eastern Europe. Analysing how actors (curators, ethnographers, and public authorities) are in charge of building a specific visitor experience is crucial in understanding if the public function of the museum changed during these times of uncertainty.