ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects upon that to reveal the museum space as a powerful means of communicating and influencing how place is experienced by migrant communities. Communities more often thought to be recent arrivals, such as travellers, Jewish communities and Italians, were shown to have settled in Northern Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The notion of the shared experience of immigration into Northern Ireland was the focus of the exhibition Our People, Our Times, created by the Northern Ireland Museums Council (NIMC) in 2004. The blended approach to cultural diversity is demonstrated by a programme of activities coordinated by the Mid-Antrim Museums Service titled Cultural Fusions, presented as a means to promote and share experiences of different cultures 'amongst indigenous and ethnic minority groups'. Crucially, minority ethnic community arts and heritage should be valued as a means to mark and celebrate difference, without thinking that will result in other cultures being threatened or diminished.
