Reflexive Migration Research in the Museum. Potentials and Perspectives of Virtual Realities (SFB 1604 - Transfer Project)

The SFB aims to contribute perspectives of reflexive migration research to the transfer within the framework of a real-world laboratory in a museum context and with the help of dialogical, participatory and intervening formats. The transfer project also serves to gain additional data and insights into the production of migration-related meanings.

In the first funding phase, these two goals are to be achieved in cooperation with the application partner Documentation Center and Museum on Migration in Germany ( DOMiD). The planned real-world laboratory uses the potential of virtual reality tools to renegotiate the social significance of migration and make it possible to experience and discuss different representations.

In the exhibition builder, virtual exhibition modules are created in which other and new narratives of the migration society can be inserted at a low threshold; in the place changer, real existing places are depicted as digital twins and, for example, re-contextualized or reinterpreted by erecting digital monuments to victims of racist violence. Firstly, the aim is to shift the agency of storytelling towards marginalized groups and to research the effects of this on all those involved from society, academia and museum practice. Secondly, concrete results of this new perspective as well as the reflexive perspective and the research results of the CRC will be incorporated into the development of the House of the Immigration Society. The result will be concrete modules as well as an evaluated model for the use of virtual reality (VR), which can be implemented and further developed in further practical transfers.