Cultural Co-Creation: Towards a Non-Representational Study of the Museum Visitor Experience

Published research in the social sciences increasingly values what is countable over the numinous; it highlights the authoritative and atomizing over the convivial and felt. The term “datalogical turn” was coined to describe the shifts in how research has been conducted in the social sciences with the advent of digital tools for managing and comparing vast amounts of data. Research that privileges data short-circuits critical conversation by cloaking itself in scientific authority and, in the process, de-values the shared human experience. Proponents of non-representational theory, especially those working in museum and heritage studies, have responded with work that valorizes individual experience but stops short of intentionally placing it in conversation with others. As sites of institutional “memory-keeping” museums and heritage facilities are on the front lines of culture creation. These are the places where conversations happen in focused, intentionally constructed spaces highly susceptible to the pressures of authority and commerce. This paper builds on prior work in affective architectures and heritage sites to propose the concept of “cultural co-creation” as a means to describe the multitude of conversations we engage in together to construct a shared narrative of our human experiences. I argue that we, as interdisciplinary scholars, can make more meaningful contributions to the evolving narrative of culture by adopting a non-representational approach focused on studying and valorizing the conviviality of cultural co-creation. A truly interdisciplinary way to counter the datalogical turn suggests a synthesis of research methodologies and critical theory, especially those rooted in sociology. To illustrate how this might work in practice, I present a brief study employing Phil Smith’s method of the group dérive to explore the museum visitor experience and how it relates to cultural co-creation at the Regional Archeological Museum Antonio Salinas in Palermo, Sicily.