“OUR STORIES ARE OFTEN FORGOTTEN”: BELONGING, STORYTELLING, AND INFORMATION SEEKING FOR SOUTH ASIANS IN WASHINGTON DC, MARYLAND, AND VIRGINIA MUSEUMS

Abstract

Museums play a critical role in cultural representation and position themselves as public education institutions, but do not always serve all communities equally (Bennett, 1988; Coleman & McLaughlin, 2021; Duncan, 1995; Levin 2017a; Levin 2017b; Salvatore, 2021; Sigfúsdóttir, 2021; Simmons, 2021). This dissertation involves members of South Asian communities in the Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia area (DMV), as they are a community frequently overlooked by museum research and museum efforts, despite living in an area heavy with museum industry. For museums to serve this community effectively, they need a better understanding of the particular cultural heritage needs and information seeking practices of community members. To explore these topics, I ask two overarching research questions: First, how do members of DMV-based South Asian communities engage with museums and cultural heritage spaces? Second, how do they engage with community or cultural memory more broadly? I conduct arts-based drawing sessions and focus groups with members of DMV-based South Asian communities where they discuss their experiences and desires around museums and cultural heritage information. These methods are derived from Simon’s philosophy of the participatory museum (2010) and incorporate recent efforts to involve multiple members of communities in museum curation and museum research (Palau-Pellicer et al., 2019; Pegno & Farrar, 2017). Additionally, the combination of focus groups and arts-based methods simultaneously allow for multiple avenues of participant expression and communication while decentering the presence and perspective of the researcher, leading to a more comfortable space for participants to discuss a topic they view as rooted in colonial harm. The study finds members of South Asian communities in the DMV do not have strong personal relationships with museums, largely as a result of museums’ colonial histories. Additionally, the findings indicate that traditional museum curation and programming may not be compatible with participants’ information seeking behaviors, as they often seek cultural heritage information via personal narratives and storytelling rather than documented history and artifacts. Such insight can help museums create more effective programming for participants and mitigate the harm caused by colonial museum practices.