Local histories, global cultures: contemporary collecting in transnational space

How might knowledge of socio-spatial reality beyond regional boundaries help social history museums continue to support and define regional identities? Inspired by actor-networks and emotional geography, this thesis brings posthumanism to an Australian regional museum to study contemporary people-place interactions. Research stems from a responsive, inclusive and participatory museology. Using a museum/laboratory construct to destabilize subject/object, people/place and local/global dualisms, a participatory, performative methodology: body mapping, brings identity and place into being. This event produces new worlds beyond classification, expressive of non-representational concerns, and attentive to the senses and contemporary mobilities. Shaped by museum users as collaborators and co-constructors of embodied knowledge, these worlds challenge and enliven the museum. A viscero-spatial curatorship develops. This more-than-institutional thinking folds theory and practice to evolve the museum as a site of production. Here, mobile bodies enact global space, and interpretation becomes an emotional engagement with multiple worlds. Boundaries separating the research, collection and display of place-based identities dissolve. This emergent working practice captures local identities as human/non-human entanglements in fluid, affective transnational spaces.