Email this article Staging the museum: script intersections and heritage communication in the digital age
Abstract
This article reconceptualises the museum as a planetary relational field and advances a creative research design using academic theatre. It introduces script intersections to describe how scientific preservation, ancestral dignity, restitution justice, ecological ethics, philanthropy, and consumer spectacle overlap and compete within museum encounters. Structured as a three-act play, the study personifies artefacts, human remains, natural specimens, curators, visitors, officials, donors, and publics, including a Collector from the 1840s and a Public Sphere from the 2020s, to stage contested negotiations of legitimacy, memory, and belonging at institutions such as the British Museum. The analysis draws on digital ethnography of Xiaohongshu posts and reflexive field observation, showing how platform publics re-voice heritage through tropes of national treasure and homecoming while also celebrating conservation as care. The article proposes a planetisation turn in intercultural communication that extends analysis beyond inter-human dialogue to human-object-platform-planet entanglements. Theatricalisation functions as method and argument, holding evidence, affect, and analysis together to reimagine museums as stages where intercultural authority is unsettled and futures of accountability are negotiated.
Received on: 16 September 2025
Accepted on: 06 April 2026
Published on: 29 April 2026
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Ahmed, Sara. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700372.
Anderson, Jane , and Kim Christen. 2013. “Chuck a Copyright on It’: Dilemmas of Digital Return and the Possibilities for Traditional Knowledge Licenses and Labels.” Museum Anthropology Review 7 (1–2): 105–26.
Anderson, Jane, and Kimberly Christen . 2019. “Toward Slow Archives.” Archival Science 19 (2): 87–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09307-x.
Appadurai, Arjun . 2012. “Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In Interpreting Objects and Collections, edited by Susan M. Pearce, 76–91. Routledge.
Bennett, Tony . 2013. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge.
British Museum. 2018. “Collections Management Policy.” British Museum.
“British Museum Act 1963.” 2011. Legislation.gov.uk. 2011. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1963/24/contents.
Byram, Michael . 1997. Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Clevedon, United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters.
Byrne, Sarah , Anne Clarke, Rodney Harrison, and Robin Torrence. 2011. Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum. New York: Springer.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh . 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Clifford, James . 1997. “Museums as Contact Zones.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 188–219. Harvard University Press.
Conquergood, Dwight . 2002. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” TDR: The Drama Review 46 (2): 145–56.
“Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums.” 2002. ICOM. 2002. https://icom.museum/en/ressource/declaration-on-the-importance-and-value-of-universal-museums/.
Denzin, Norman K. 2003. Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. Thousand Oaks, California, USA: SAGE Publications.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 2005. “Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums.” GOV.UK. October 11, 2005. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-for-the-care-of-human-remains-in-museums.
Dervin, Fred . 2016. Interculturality in Education: A Theoretical and Methodological Toolbox. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.
Digital Benin . 2022. “Digital Benin: Catalogue of Benin Objects Worldwide.” Digitalbenin.org. 2022. https://digitalbenin.org/.
Gudykunst, William B. 2005. Theorizing about Intercultural Communication. Thousand Oaks, California, USA: SAGE Publications.
Hamilakis, Yannis . 2007. The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2020. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, North Carolina, USA: Duke University Press.
Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
Hicks, Dan . 2020. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press.
Holmes, Paul . 2017. “Intercultural Communication in the Global Workplace: Critical Approaches.” In The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication, edited by Young Yun Kim. Wiley.
Horniman Museum and Gardens. 2022. “Horniman to Return Ownership of Benin Bronzes to Nigeria - Horniman Museum.” Horniman Museum and Gardens. August 7, 2022. https://www.horniman.ac.uk/story/horniman-to-return-ownership-of-benin-bronzes-to-nigeria.
Jackson, Jane . 2012. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication. London, United Kingdom: Routledge.
Jesus College. 2021. “Jesus College Returns Benin Bronze in World First.” Jesus College University of Cambridge. October 27, 2021. https://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/articles/jesus-college-returns-benin-bronze-world-first.
Kim, Young Yun . 2000. Becoming Intercultural: An Integrative Theory of Communication and Cross-Cultural Adaptation. Thousand Oaks, California, USA: SAGE Publications.
Macdonald, Sharon . 2010. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London, United Kingdom: Routledge.
Madison, D. Soyini . 2011. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. Thousand Oaks, California, USA: SAGE Publications.
Manchester Museum. 2021. “Manchester Museum: Policy for the Care and Use of Human Remains (the University of Manchester).” Manchester.ac.uk. 2021. https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=34045.
———. 2025. “Displaying Asru: A Conversation. University of Manchester.” Manchester Museum. December 10, 2025. https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/event/reflecting-on-responses-to-asru-an-open-discussion.
Miller, Daniel , Lynn Meskell, Michael Rowlands, Matthew Engelke, Bill Maurer, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Webb Keane. 2005. Materiality. Durham, North Carolina, USA: Duke University Press.
MUSEUMS ASSOCIATION. 2016. “Code of Ethics for Museums .” https://archive-media.museumsassociation.org/20012016-code-of-ethics-single-page.pdf.
Nakayama, Thomas K. , and Rona Tamiko Halualani. 2010. The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication. Malden, Massachusetts, USA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Nixon, Rob . 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard University Press.
Pratt, Mary Louise . 1998. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning across Languages and Cultures, edited by Vivian Zamel and Ruth Spack, 171–85. Routledge.
Saldaña, Johnny . 2005. Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre. Walnut Creek, California, USA: AltaMira Press.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen , and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2021. Intercultural Politeness: Managing Relations across Cultures. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
St. Clair, William . 1998. Lord Elgin and the Marbles. 3rd ed. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Ting-Toomey, Stella . 2017. “Conflict Face-Negotiation Theory: Tracking Its Evolutionary Journey.” In Conflict Management and Intercultural Communication: The Art of Intercultural Harmony, edited by Xiaodong Dai and Guo-Ming Chen, 21–33. Routledge.
UK Government. 2004. “Human Tissue Act 2004.” Legislation.gov.uk. 2004. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/30/contents.
University of Aberdeen. 2021. “University of Aberdeen Returns Benin Bronze to Nigeria. .” Abdn.ac.uk. November 25, 2021. https://www.abdn.ac.uk/law/blog/the-repatriation-of-benin-bronze-and-decolonisation-of-museums-views-from-the-university-of-aberdeen.
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21622/ILCC.2026.06.1.1676
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2026 Lin Zheng
Insights into Language, Culture and Communication
E-ISSN: 2812-491X
P-ISSN: 2812-4901
Published by:
Academy Publishing Center (APC)
Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT)
Alexandria, Egypt
