ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a useful way of thinking about recent, alternative perspectives on exhibitions. It introduces some ideas currently swirling around the field of exhibition development. Lisa Roberts describes the field's limited understanding of museum learning and proposes a new take on visitor purposes and experiences that encompasses not just education, but also 'social interaction, reminiscence, fantasy, personal involvement, and restoration'. Several other researchers use a sociocultural lens in examining museum learning and experience. This perspective has profound implications for the field, including staff training and exhibition and program design, because it requires to examine how visitors interact with each other and the wider world, not simply analyze individual 'transformation'. Reverential museum experiences are deeply emotional ones. And while it may seem obvious that a medium such as an exhibition would speak to the affective as well as the cognitive, the field has been slow to acknowledge it.
