Talking about prisons: making sense of difficult heritage at Peterhead Prison Museum.

Prison museums have become an increasingly popular tourist attraction. Presenting visitors with stories and exhibits pertaining to countries' penal history, they engage with difficult and often dissonant heritage. Peterhead Prison Museum ceased operation as a working museum in 2013, reopening as a visitor attraction in 2016. Considered Scotland's toughest prison and known as "Scotland's gulag", its turbulent 125-year history is presented in various exhibits that engage with daily life, riots, prison escapes, punishment and murder. This project, funded by The British Academy, aims to explore how people make sense of difficult heritage by studying how visitors examine and experience different types of exhibits at Peterhead Prison Museum. Using a methodology grounded in Conversation Analysis, this study draws upon over sixteen hours of video footage filmed over four days in five different exhibits to examine how people approach, talk about and interact with difficult heritage. This paper will consider how people explore two different exhibit spaces: "the Murder Cell", which presents visitors with a staged murder scene; and the "Cat o' Nine Tails", which hosts a former corporal punishment tool. We argue that what people look at and how they respond to the exhibit space and each other within it contributes towards sense-making practices and how they experience difficult heritage. This study offers a unique methodological perspective to examine people's engagement with difficult heritage in prison museum environments. In addition to contributing to academic knowledge, the impact of the findings will help heritage providers to consider how they design and curate museum exhibits to encourage certain types of interaction, reflection and experience.