ERASMUS+ Staff Mobility For Teaching Program: Lehrkooperation mit Sigrún Einarsdottir: Museums as social structure and agent: Museums as social structure and agent between persistence and transition

This workshop will introduce the students in the social functions and expections that museums have to fulfill in contemorary society. At first, and at the first day of the workshop, we will discuss the question whether museums need to have a social legitimation for their existence at all. After some theoretical deliberations we will exemplify this question by a few thoughts experiments. At second there will be a presentation of the changes, museums experienced in the last decades: what is the "museum boom", and how can we explain it? At the end of this session we will discuss the transition of museums from socially passive to active institutions. We will then change the perspective from a macro to a micro perspective by thinking about the types of people who visit museums and how they react (cognitively, emotionally) to exhibits. The lecturer of this workshop has contributed to answers to these questions in an extensive field experiment named "eMotion" (see http://www.mapping-museum-experience.com/en) in Switzerland. The eMotion team has reviewed and analyzed the visitor experiences and have come up with a comprehensive typology of experience types that can be helpful for museums in better understanding their visitors and designing their exhibitions.

ERASMUS+ Teaching Assignment, at Bifröst University Iceland, Master Course on "Museums as social structure and agent between persistence and transition"