ABSTRACT
Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums is the first volume to offer comprehensive insights into visitor reactions to a wide range of museum exhibitions, memorials, and memory sites.
Drawing exclusively upon empirical research, chapters within the book offer critical insights about visitor experience at museums and memory sites in the United States, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, the UK, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and Israel. The contributions to the volume explore visitor experience in all its complexity and argue that visitors are more than just "learners". Approaching visitor experience as a multidimensional phenomenon, the book positions visitor experience within a diverse national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational context. It also considers the impact of museums’ curatorial and design choices, visitor motivations and expectations, and the crucial role emotions play in shaping understanding of historical events and subjects. By approaching visitors as active interpreters of memory spaces and museum exhibitions, Popescu and the contributing authors provide a much-needed insight into the different ways in which members of the public act as "agents of memory", endowing this history with personal and collective meaning and relevance.
Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums offers significant insights into audience motivation, expectation, and behaviour. It is essential reading for academics, postgraduate students and practitioners with an interest in museums and heritage, visitor studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and tourism.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|100 pages
Visitor Experience in Museum Spaces
chapter 2|15 pages
Visitor Emotions, Experientiality, Holocaust, and Human Rights
chapter 3|15 pages
“Really Made You Feel for the Jews Who Went Through This Terrible Time in History”
chapter 4|15 pages
Understanding Visitors' Bodily Engagement with Holocaust Museum Architecture
chapter 5|12 pages
Attention Please: The Tour Guide Is Here to Speak Out
chapter 6|15 pages
The Impact of Emotions, Empathy, and Memory in Holocaust Exhibitions
part II|74 pages
Digital Engagement Inside and Outside the Museum and Memory Site
chapter 1188|14 pages
“…It No Longer Is the Same Place” 1
chapter 9|12 pages
“Ways of Seeing”. Visitor Response to Holocaust Photographs
chapter 11|15 pages
Curating the Past
chapter 12|16 pages
Diversity, Digital Programming, and the Small Holocaust Education Centre
part III|91 pages
Visitors at Former Camp Sites