Museums and a Progressive Sense of Place

In this chapter we avail ourselves of Massey’s ideas and open them out—certainly beyond the scope of her own aims—to consider how museums can contribute to the development of such a progressive sense of place through display, without omitting or ignoring situated antagonisms and social divisions. Considering belonging as related to emotional attachments that lead to feelings of being “at home” often in relation to a place, what are, in the present “age of migration”, the conflicts between belonging and non-belonging? What if different feelings of belonging converge and compete in the same place? How can these be represented, through objects and displays, in order to create new perspectives for visitors on place and social relations? We explore this in reference to European-funded work we have undertaken on museums and migration. Bringing to bear our respective perspectives as a museologist and an architect, we examine museums’ explicit and implicit preoccupations with place and the constructions of the social world that they allow, before returning to Massey’s ideas to help conceive of museum productions of a progressive sense of place.