Experiments with bodies in social space: towards a contemporary understanding of place-based identities at the social history museum

Abstract

This paper considers how knowledge of socio-spatial reality beyond regional boundaries can help social history museums engage with and construct regional identities. Inspired by ways in which human geographers conceptualise place and space, my research explores contemporary mobilities and posthumanist concerns to destabilise subject/object, people/place and local/global dualisms. At the heart of this work is a participatory, performative methodology, called ‘MAP:me’. During two ‘body mapping’ workshops, eight research participants enact identity and place into being on life-size paper ‘body maps’; an exhibition to showcase their work is produced. The results of ‘body mapping’ reveal globalised identities expressive of non-representational concerns and attentive to the senses and contemporary mobilities. Shaped by research participants as collaborators and co-constructors of embodied knowledge, this way of interpreting social lives enlivens both museum and visitor. A ‘viscero-spatial curatorship’ emerges from this work to capture local identities as human/non-human entanglements in fluid, affective transnational spaces.