Touching Trails: Museum Exhibitions, Family Memories, and Forced Displacement

This chapter examines audience responses to exhibitions addressing both historical and contemporary experiences of forced migration. The historical and art exhibitions, held in 2020 at two city museums in Finland, emerged from a collaborative effort among researchers, artists, and museum professionals. Drawing on visitor survey data, the chapter analyzes emotional reactions and the ways in which individuals relate these exhibitions to their own familial histories of forced displacement. Brief narrative responses reveal how the often traumatic legacies of World War II continue to be transmitted through family narratives. Museums provide a multisensory environment where emotions can surface, and memories are collectively negotiated and conveyed. These familial recollections are also reinterpreted in relation to national narratives of displacement and ongoing global migration crises. Positioned as institutions of epistemic authority, museums contribute to building resilience by facilitating the collective processing of difficult and contested histories within a comparative framework. In doing so museums possess the potential to serve as spaces of transformative learning and to foster broader societal dialogue.