Epistemic Dissemination as Dialogue: A Case of Museum‐Visitor Stance Negotiation Through Multilingualism

ABSTRACT Despite the growing scholarly attention to the issue of epistemic dissemination within a multilingual context, few studies have taken the agency of knowledge‐receivers into account and considered the process of epistemic dissemination as a dialogue where both knowledge‐providers and knowledge‐receivers negotiate on the disseminated knowledge. In order to explore the dialogic nature of epistemic dissemination, this study draws upon the notions of stance‐taking and stance negotiation, and based on the case of bilingual panel scripts used in Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM), it investigates (1) how SJRM (knowledge‐provider) took different stances to the history of Shanghai Jewish refugees (knowledge) in the bilingual scripts, (2) how SJRM, by producing the panel scripts, expected to negotiate these stances with different groups of target visitors (knowledge‐receiver) for the dissemination of the knowledge, and (3) how visitors, as the other side of the dialogue, made a mixed response to SJRM's expectations on stance negotiation. Through this case, the study expands on the current understanding of epistemic dissemination and brings theoretical implications to the studies working on the related key notions.