Using immersive and interactive approaches to interpreting traumatic experiences for tourists

In this stanza from a poem about the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, the English poet James Fenton conjures up an image of this Museum not only as a place of wonder and curiosity but also as a metaphor for travel, for encounters with ‘the other’. Museums are, for him, places of the imagination in which one can perform a multitude of identities, largely because one can lose a sense of self in them. Travel, imagination and immersion are, in this image of museums, a productive constellation of ideas that capture some of the experiential aspect of visits to museums and heritage sites.