ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that museums need to be seen as part of wider cultural and political practices of memory, and that the case study museums draw their emotional repertoire and power from this. I then set out the range of methods adopted in the book, including display analysis, drawing particularly on museological and visual culture approaches, staff interviews, and visitor studies of different types. A key preoccupation in understanding emotional practice in the museums is how emotion can be identified, where it resides, how it is expressed, and where it comes from. Theoretical and methodological approaches from studies of affect and emotion offer possibilities for studying visitors’ emotional performances and the emotional contract between visitors and the museums in which familiar prompts within the displays are congruent with people’s dispositions.
