ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the "participatory turn" as a way of democratizing and decolonizing museums and archives shaped by class, race, colonialism, gender, and other historical power relations. It presents three "core stories" of researchers in practice, creating online multimedia archives and exhibitions based on collections from Russia, rural New Hampshire, and a First Nation in British Columbia. Each of these groundbreaking projects reveals exciting possibilities and emerging dilemmas related to participatory digital archives and virtual museums. The Kommunalka virtual museum draws from its producers' autoethnography of growing up in communal apartment buildings. The Beyond Brown Paper archive applies interactive blogging capabilities to the task of curating a large collection of photos documenting rural workers' lives. The collaborative production of the Dane Wajich multimedia exhibition trained First Nations youth as filmmakers and media producers while inspiring in-depth community discussions on the best ways to virtually repatriate cultural objects and to "tell the important stories" about them.
