| Abstract [eng] |
Visitor experience is considered a key instance through which museums establish long-term relationships with multiple audiences and operationalize their agendas. Despite the acknowledgment of the importance of visitor experience, there is a lack of systematic research and understanding of this phenomenon. The dissertation presents an account of conceptualizing the visitor experience as a nexus of visitor-museum interactions, framed in the genre configurations of a museum visit. The proposed framework offers useful optics for systematizing visitor-museum interactions in museum practices and developing a more informed understanding of the visitor experience and its antecedents. It is the only study that provides a holistic approach to the visitor experience in the context of ethnographic open-air museums, analyzing a range of visitor-museum interactions and outcomes in the three largest ethnographic open-air museums in Sweden (Skansen), Lithuania (The Lithuanian Open-air Museum), and Belarus (The Belarusian Museum of Wooden Vernacular Architecture and Lifestyle). The conceptualization of visitor experience integrates an interdisciplinary research corpus that combines the theories of experience, genre, and participation. Overall, the study suggests that genre configurations facilitate a structural similarity of visitor experiences and dispositions of affective, cognitive, physical, and novelty realms. This approach allows us to address the broadly acknowledged complexity and ambiguity of the visitor experience on the one hand and integrate the recent advancements in museology on the other. |
