The Rohwer Museum: Navigating Civic Education and Difficult Histories

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Navigating Learning and Dialogue in Informal Education: Innovative Approaches to Exhibiting Complex and Novel Topics (Table 5)

Abstract

This study explores how the politics of memory and civic education intersect in the museum spaces dedicated to historical events that are silenced in the collective memory of a nation. I apply the museum as text methodology (Ravelli, 2006) to examine the exposition of the World War II Japanese American Internment Museum in Arkansas, USA, to reveal what messages it conveys to the visitors about citizenship and belonging on the example of the Japanese American Internment victims. The findings suggest that the museum highlights the complexity of past events in a thought-provoking way, while, at the same time, sending controversial messages about citizenship and belonging.

Author

• Daria Smirnova, University of South Florida