The session “War, Resilience, and Democracy in Museums” assembles four papers that discuss whether and how museums can create democratic value and critical visitor thinking in times of highly contentious memory wars. What can be the role of museums to safeguard democracy in public memory? First, Christopher Sommer analyzes in “’I am not convinced by democracy’ – Remembering the Second World War in Virtual Reality at Bosnian Herzegovinian and English war museums” how virtual reality can function as an educational tool. Through empirical visitor research in two museums in each country, he probes the possibilities and limitations of immersive virtual reality. This is followed up in Stephan Jaeger’s paper “Democracy and Visitor Transformation between Past and Present? Americans and the Holocaust in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2018-2025).” Jaeger’s paper analyzes the design and narrative structure of exhibitions through memory concepts and whether exhibitions primarily reaffirm visitors’ belief or whether and how possibly transform their attitudes towards democracy and migration and migration policies. The paper provides a close reading of the potential to strengthen diverse democratic thinking in Americans and the Holocaust in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for visitors in Donald Trump’s America in 2025. Finally, Maria Kobielska analyzes the concept of museum resilience as possible tool for democratic exhibiting in her paper “Resilient museums in times of memory wars.” She analyzes several Polish museum exhibitions from the last decade to identify their representational strengths and weaknesses in the context of resistance to populist intervention, while also reflecting on whether resilience has a potential for politicized, non-pluralistic, and undemocratic representations of contested pasts. Emiliano Abad analyzes, employing a comparative transoceanic methodology, how two museums – the Museo de América, located in a former European metropolis (Madrid, Spain) and the Museo Histórico y Regional Lorenzo Vintter (Patagonia, Argentina) – reflect and challenge dominant national and colonial narratives. Taken together, all four papers use examples of difficult pasts such as war, colonization, and genocide to discuss the potential and pitfalls for museums to engage visitors in democratic processes.
Christopher Sommer, University of Oldenburg "'I am not convinced by democracy' – Remembering the Second World War in Virtual Reality at Bosnian Herzegovinian and English War Museums"
War museums have always sought to awe their audiences with immersive media, such as panoramas of grand battles and dioramas featuring thousands of tin soldiers locked in combat. Technological advances and affordable hardware have brought immersive media into the virtual realm, making it more convincing and sophisticated even allowing visitors to influence the narrative. These museums seem especially interested in using virtual reality as an educational tool: Visitors can experience WWII bombing raids in English museums or assist Yugoslav Partisans against Axis forces and Nazi collaborators in Bosnian Herzegovinian museums. In the Global North, war museums no longer aim to glorify a nation or promote war as a tool of statecraft; instead, they strive to show the structures and contexts behind war, and most importantly, to elicit empathy in their audiences for soldiers and civilians alike. However, comparatively little is known about how visitors perceive this immersive media. Does it encourage deep reflection on war as an anthropological phenomenon, or does it perpetuate simplistic narratives that gloss over the complexities of war? To complicate matters, these museums subscribe to the philosophy of promoting peace by emphasising the need for a strong military to defend a nation against perceived threats. In the former Yugoslavian context, this idea is intertwined with the more recent fallout from the Balkan Wars. This paper highlights the results of qualitative visitor interviews and focus groups conducted at the Avro Heritage Museum in Manchester, the Royal Air Force Museum Midlands, Kozara Memorial Park and Museum, and the Battle of Neretva Museum in Jablanica, to learn what audiences take away from engaging with these contentious narratives.
Stephan Jaeger, University of Manitoba "Democracy and Visitor Transformation between Past and Present? Americans and the Holocaust in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2018 2025)" Can historical exhibitions teach democracy in the present? By employing concepts of multidirectional, cosmopolitan, and agonistic memory, my paper will analyze how exhibitions that primarily present historical scenarios can be utilized in the present. Do they need a strong moral or activist voice to enhance a strong commitment to democracy or do they work better by employing multiple perspectives and prioritize a factual style? My paper will first give a brief overview of museums in Washington, DC in September 2025, in their ability and limitations to trigger visitors’ critical thinking and possibly transform their attitudes towards democracy, migration policies, and free critical thinking. Visitors can still notice a wide array of contentious themes from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum to the Air and Space Museum, from climate change to evolutionary theory, from migration crises to systemic white racism, among others. Second, as its primary case study, my paper will analyze the potential of the exhibition Americans and the Holocaust in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2018 2025, presumably to reopen in February 2026 after a six month closure for “gallery updates”) to lead visitors to self positioning and possibly transforming their attitudes to forced migration, immigration quota, and American isolationism in past and present. The museum’s website describes the exhibition as “a portrait of American society that shows how the Depression, isolationism, xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism shaped responses to Nazism and the Holocaust,” basically explaining the disinterest in rescuing European Jews. I will analyze how/whether an exhibition that primarily represents the past can cross from history to memory and seriously impact the self positioning of visitors for possibly defending democracy in the present.
Maria Kobielska, Jagiellonian University in Cracow - “Resilient Museums in Times of Memory Wars”
In this proposed presentation, I consider museums as public institutions and cultural objects/spaces in the context of their functioning in times of political turbulence, populist shifts and cultural wars. I draw upon my recently proposed hypothesis of “exhibition resilience” (Kobielska 2024), originating from a detailed case study of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland, in the context of the infamous takeover of the institution by the “mnemonic warriors” aiming to modify its overall message. I argue that their actions have been at least partially hindered by the inherent structure of the permanent exhibition, and describe this specific potential power of an exhibition as its resilience that manifests itself in preserving traces of any change, undermining modifications’ influence and, sometimes, making them counter-productive. As a next step, I develop a broader understanding of museum resilience in relation to any act of instrumentalization, hostile reinterpretation, appropriation and populist criticism. I will consider several examples of Polish historical museums that propose narratives that diverge, at least to some extent, from the status quo of national memory (for example: the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Emigration Museum in Gdynia, the Silesian Museum in Katowice). An analysis conducted from the perspective of resilience will allow me to identify their strengths and weaknesses in the context of resistance to populist intervention, instrumentalization or reinterpretation, and further, to distinguish the factors that determine the resilient potential of an exhibition. At the same time, I will discuss resilience as a mechanism which in theory can, conversely, contribute also to the influence exerted by politicized, non-pluralistic, and undemocratic representations (or: misrepresentations) of difficult, contested pasts.
Emiliano Abad (University of Coimbra) Borderland museums: rewriting colonialism beyond democratic times What is the relationship between museums, identity, and democracy? Democracy requires citizen participation, and participation demands the construction of collective identities. These identities are shaped by narratives: stories tied to notions of origin and belonging. The main objective of this paper is to identify, compare and deconstruct the master historical narratives of two postcolonial museums: the Museo de América, located in a former European metropolis (Madrid, Spain) and the Museo Histórico y Regional Lorenzo Vintter (Patagonia, Argentina), located on a historic conquered territory central for the so called Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885). Following a comparative transoceanic methodology, the article analyzes how each museum reflects or challenges dominant national and colonial narratives. The Museo de América was established in 1941 by Franco’s fascist regime. After Spain’s transition to democracy, the museum closed temporarily in 1981 to reformulate its message in preparation for the 1992 Quincentenary of the Discovery of the Americas. Since then, and especially under the appointment of its new director, Andrés Gutiérrez Usillos (2023), it has aimed to offer a more critical and pluralistic view of colonial history. In contrast, the Museo Histórico y Regional Lorenzo Vintter was founded in 1949 and underwent several closures due to Argentina’s shifting political climate. It was fully renovated in 2010 and, like the Spanish museum, is currently engaged in a new museographic process aimed at democratizing and decolonizing its own narratives. This paper presents empirical findings through the lens of the following research question: How inclusive, pluralistic, and democratic are these two museums? It explores who is authorized to speak, which cultures are represented, and how museums might respond to contemporary challenges such as racism, xenophobia, and the globalization of memory. Ultimately, it asks how institutions historically tied
20260730T140020260730T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires6.15. Museum & Memory #2: War, Resilience, and Democracy in MuseumsSVE2MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
