Seized: Performance Autoethnography in the UK Border Force National Museum

Introduction

This article addresses the representation of international borders and border security in museums, using performance autoethnography to investigate the ways that exhibits reflect the border’s hierarchical ordering of bodies. Through an analysis of the author’s embodied experiences within the Border Force National Museum in Liverpool and the creative processes that flowed from this experience, the theatricality of the museum’s exhibits is uncovered and likened to the ways that performance is bound up in the construction of borders in the outside world. This approach demonstrates that by attending closely to a researcher’s own memories, affect and creative imaginings, new insights can be derived about the categorisation of bodies as insiders or outsiders at border control sites.

Politics and international relations (IR) scholars have established the close relationship between international relations and museum exhibitions, ¹ and studies from a range of disciplines have addressed the representation of migrants in museums, monuments and other cultural institutions. ² This latter body of research tends to focus on the manner and extent to which border crossing experiences are included in cultural narratives. In some cases though, museums address international borders from a policy-oriented perspective, by focusing on national border enforcement practices including customs, anti-smuggling activities, and in some cases immigration control. ³

One example of this nature is the Border Force National Museum, which depicts UK customs and immigration control from the 18th century to the present day. This museum was established in 2009, in the wake of a formal partnership between National Museums Liverpool and UK Border Force. ⁴ It is publicly billed as the ‘Seized!’ gallery; a major focus is the smuggling of illegal or counterfeit goods into the UK, as well as efforts by authorities to combat these crimes. Paired with this is the topic of immigration control, with a notable presence of immigration-related content throughout.

To examine the representations of borders within the Border Force Museum, this article proceeds as follows: first, I address the performance qualities of international borders, with particular attention paid to the heightened theatricality that is employed at border control sites. Following this, I examine parallel performance elements common to museum exhibits, discussing the specific characteristics of the Border Force National Museum that mirror the theatricality of border control in the outside world. The latter part of this article turns to an alternative account of the Border Force Museum, developed through creative, performance autoethnographic writing. This section provides a theatrical representation of the author’s research experiences in the museum, which were impacted by a hybrid positionality that gave rise to conflicting feelings of belonging and exclusion. The article concludes with a summary of the insights raised by the performance autoethnographic methods, and suggests similar avenues of further research.

International Borders and Performance

International borders and museums are both constituted through performance, a broad term which covers a range of interactive phenomena from ritual and social performance to staged theatrical events. Over the past two decades, IR scholars have increasingly recognised the value of performance as a theoretical lens that elucidates the ways that political phenomena are saturated with aspects of interactive display and reception. ⁵ Performance has been brought into IR frames from a number of influential angles, ranging from Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, to Victor Turner and Richard Schechner’s theatre-anthropology collaborations, to Judith Butler’s accounts of performativity and potentially subversive performance acts. ⁶ At present a growing number of researchers are making use of their own performance practices to gain new insights about international politics. ⁷

Given the rich and varied ways that performance can be used as a window onto the international, it is clear that a performance-informed analysis can bring nuance to our understanding of borders as sites that are socially constructed and enacted. A number of scholars working at the intersections of performance and politics have examined the social performances that frame the negotiation of behaviours and identities at border sites . ⁸ However, for the purpose of this article I am primarily interested in an understanding of ‘performance’ that re-centres the creative, artistic aspects of performing. This might be helpful, I suggest, in placing a greater emphasis on the experiential qualities of live, ephemeral, interactive events.

Consequently, I am suggesting that significant insights can be obtained by considering the theatricality of border crossing. Theatricality is a capacious and contested term, but for the purposes of this article it can be understood as a heightened mode of performance that is distinct from the everyday. Performances that are theatrical are those that call attention to their own crafting, often through the strategic and selective use of lighting, scenography, scripted roles, and the control of bodies within the performance space. ⁹ These elements signal the extraordinary nature of the event, and participants are called upon to sustain the theatrical frame as both actors and spectators.

This kind of theatricality is evident at the border in the heightened characterisation of border agents, the choreography of arrivals and departures, scripted interrogations, and the vivid scenography of border control; and these theatrical elements combine to conjure particular modes of performance from everyone present at the border. Fundamentally, the theatricality of border control checkpoints delimits the ways that people can or must present themselves if they are to cross without difficulty. Borders separate people into those who belong inside and those who do not. They function as sites where difference – calculated via markers of race, ethnicity, disability, gender, and other features – is scrutinised and evaluated as a means of separating insiders from outsiders; valuable and productive citizens from different and risky others. ¹⁰ The stakes are therefore higher, and the performances are more theatrical than everyday experience.

As Sophie Nield suggests, people who cross through border control checkpoints are called upon to perform a heightened version of a character proscribed by political, legal and cultural scripts. When people present themselves at border control sites, they embody their authentic selves, but they simultaneously endeavour to depict the character they wish authorities to believe in. ¹¹ The overlap between these two presences, or the degree of artifice employed, varies from person to person. For those whose permission to enter might be called into question, this experience is often unpleasant, marked by a level of stress and fear equivalent to the precarity of their circumstances. In contrast though, Rachel Hall tells us that the scripted performances at borders are often enjoyed by some travellers, who enthusiastically embrace their role in security rituals as markers of their social status. ¹² Thus, the performances of border crossing are enacted differently depending on one’s position in society, and this suggests that cultural products about borders, such as museums, are also likely to be interpreted differently based on those varying positions.

We can gain further insights into the implications of these performances by considering what might be referred to as spectatorship – that is, as much as people represent particular characters at the border, they are also involved in the business of watching and interpreting the theatrical representations of others. Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall note that the border is theatrical because it is: ‘ [. . .] a space configured as theatre in which appearance, and identity, is always in question [emphasis added]. ¹³ Mark Salter affirms this view, describing border crossings as moments of crisis in which sovereign authority and individual citizenship status are tangled up in performance. At border crossings we inspect and interrogate, looking for the actor who is not quite true to the character he or she seeks to present. ¹⁴ The overriding objective is a taxonomic sorting of border-crossers according to standards of productivity, risk, and cultural belonging. As such, border control officers, security staff, and fellow passengers all take up the role of theatre critic to varying degrees.

Combined with Nield’s observation about the uniqueness of representations at the border, this attitude of scrutiny renders the border distinctly theatrical. This point is given added weight by the fact that the theatricality of the border is an embodied sensory experience. We experience, for example, the haptic nature of fingerprint scanning; our bodies stand uncomfortably in queues while observing others in their hushed interviews with border guards; or we feel the tension and anxiety of the border in our internal organs as we clutch the sharp-edged card that contains our biometric data. For people who have crossed borders feeling confident of their success, the experience of this scrutinising environment is one which reaffirms their position in a social and political hierarchy. Much the opposite is true for those who have crossed the border with the knowledge of possible failure colouring their experience throughout – for these travellers, scrutiny feels different. Whichever the case, the theatricality of the border has a heightened affective impact. Furthermore, our roles as both actors and spectators at the border are marked by an embodied theatricality, which leaves us with physical memories that might come into play when viewing the exhibits in the Border Force Museum.

Performance and Theatricality in the Border Force National Museum

The performances that create and shape borders also make their way into museum-based depictions of those borders. The scenography, characterisations, scripts and modes of spectatorship that appear at real-life borders will inevitably seep into museum exhibits about borders. However, museums in general also possess underlying qualities of performance that shape their social and cultural function and inform public interpretations of their contents. We can therefore consider the Border Force Museum as an institution that creatively performs itself while showcasing representations of national borders which have themselves been constructed through performance. These overlapping layers can be better understood by considering the ways that we experience all museums through performance.

In the first instance, the exhibition of artefacts rests on performance practices. Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblet notes that the process of selecting, curating, and displaying objects is bound up with performance – in order to qualify as an ‘artefact’ worthy of exhibit, there must first be a process of excavation from the object’s ordinary surroundings, and an identification of its precise significance. These qualities must be signalled to future observers, and so the entire practice of museum exhibition hinges on performatively representing the processes of discovery and extraction concurrent with the display of artefacts that result. ¹⁵ This is evident within the Border Force Museum, where many of the objects on display are ordinary, everyday items – for example, mobile phones, items of clothing, and fashionable children’s toys. In order to sustain the characterisation of these items as border-related artefacts, the museum uses explanatory panels, role-playing workshops and interactive games that link these objects to border security.

While the process of creating artefacts is itself a performance, we can also consider the theatricality of the spaces that those artefacts are eventually housed within. Museums have long incorporated hidden scripts, lighting, and the staging of objects, ¹⁶ which combine to determine the order in which visitors will encounter objects, and the pace at which they move through a gallery. This results in specific proprioceptive positioning, through which visitors physically orient themselves in relation to displayed objects. ¹⁷ Barbara Montero suggests that proprioceptive interpretations contribute significantly to beliefs about the value or import of the encountered object. ¹⁸ As a result, the scenographic control of bodies in the museum space is a crucial factor in the collective creation of meaning. ¹⁹

To understand this further, the Border Force Museum’s unique features are illustrative. Much of the museum’s impact is derived from its range of interactive, family-friendly displays and events. For example, before entering the museum, visitors (especially children) are invited to follow ‘Matt’s Trail’. This is a game facilitated by a colourful, interactive handout that introduces Matt, a cartoon customs officer. Matt is depicted as a man with pale skin and floppy blond hair, his wide grin lending him a naïve and guileless air. His image is hidden in multiple locations within the museum exhibits – the handout’s instructions challenge the child to find the hidden ‘Matt’ in each case, thus becoming adept at looking for what might be lurking beyond the surfaces of the displays. Other games, suitable for visitors of all ages, are interspersed throughout the museum: For example, an interactive game called ‘Spot the Smuggler’ asks participants to look at images of five passengers arriving at border control checkpoints, and challenges them to identify which of the depicted bodies poses a threat to UK security. Further along, visitors can imagine themselves as the operators of security scanners, looking at images of the contents of suitcases, searching for signs of illegality, all before the game’s timer counts down to implied, imaginary disaster.

The museum also offers ‘Home Office-approved’ workshops for young people. ²⁰ Some of these workshops are historical in nature, such as those dealing with historical weapons or searches conducted on historical ships. Others are more directly linked to present day border security. For example, Little Smugglebusters allows children under 7 years-old to learn about the practices of searching travellers’ luggage for smuggled items (‘The session includes time for free play, a suitcase search, make your own passport, role play and a song’). ²¹ The workshops entitled RUSH and Weapons Awareness teach older children about the ways that illegal drugs and knife violence are facilitated by the objects brought across UK borders from the outside. ²²

All of this adds up to a highly interactive environment, in which the displays and informational panels are supplemented by visitors’ active, embodied participation. In this sense, the Border Force Museum clearly illustrates that interactivity in museum spaces does not necessarily lead to a dialogic mode of interpretation. Although it is always possible for museum visitors to resist the meanings prescribed by exhibits, ²³ the Border Force Museum strongly encourages a particular interpretation. This comes about in part because the playful, hands-on activities encourage role play in which visitors imagine themselves as border control officers – but never as would-be border-crossers. Visitors thus encounter the objects on display not solely through the lens of their own experiences, but through their imagined perspective as powerful officials charged with protecting national security. This positions visitors as suspect scrutinisers of others, replicating the environment of scrutiny and separation that exists at international borders.

Significantly, the exhibits that detail the potential threat posed by smuggled goods are placed side by side with other exhibits that depict the threat posed by immigrants –images of ship passengers riddled with smallpox, or video testimony from former border control officers who speak about their duty to ensure the validity of immigration claims. The museum itself is located within the same building that houses the International Slavery Museum. The vast majority of visitors to the Border Force exhibits have already encountered the material presented in the other galleries in which bodies are consistently highlighted for their otherness and objectification. Upstairs, visitors view images and objects that represent the historical degradation of Africans into income-generating property. Downstairs, those same visitors encounter displays that represent migrants as potential smugglers or harbourers of economic and security threats.

Given this juxtaposition, it is my contention that the heightened theatricality of the Border Force Museum renders it a significant producer of raced, gendered, and enabled citizenship. This is because visitors are encouraged to look upon the bodies of would-be border-crossers in the same way that they look upon items of luggage or cargo, scrutinising them for their value or threat to the already-insiders within UK borders. Furthermore, they experience the museum through embodied role play that has the potential to call upon the physical memories established from visitors’ prior experiences at border control sites. This is not to suggest that every visitor experiences the Border Force Museum in the same way, but rather that the museum exhibits are staged with a particular kind of spectatorship in mind. As a result, the Border Force Museum reflects and accentuates the border’s role in scrutinising and separating bodies into insiders and outsiders.

Performance Autoethnography

Turning now to the research process undertaken within the museum, this section outlines the features of performance autoethnography that render it particularly generative of new knowledge about the theatricality of border crossing. Performance autoethnography is a well-established research method that has much in common with other reflexive and sensory-oriented ethnographic approaches. ²⁴ Like sensory autoethnography, it highlights sensorial elements of the research experience, including embodied perceptions of breath, movement, tactility and interaction. These methods naturally take account of the researcher’s own presence, using one’s embodied experience of interactions as a tool for data collection. ²⁵ Mobilising personal experience as a window into cultural phenomena, autoethnographic researchers have developed robust approaches to bring personal, often autobiographical observations into the frame of analysis and, to varying degrees, juxtapose these with the experiences of others. ²⁶

However, performance ethnography is ultimately distinct from other methods due to its connection to the fields of theatre and performance and its subsequent emphasis on exploring, documenting and showcasing multiple viewpoints through theatrical processes. A key point of all performance ethnographic methods is the centrality of creatively-worked performance practices that aim to elicit new perspectives on collected data. Through theatrical modes of documentation and presentation to others, the performance ethnographer situates the representation of data into a collective environment for knowledge generation. This might take the form of ethnodrama or ethnographic theatre, for example, but it might equally occur through applied theatre workshops that offer a more participatory negotiation of the material. ²⁷ This enables groups of people from multiple backgrounds to interactively engage with the research data, to imagine the experience of others, and to contribute to the production of knowledge derived from the research process. ²⁸

My own performance-based research methods were based on three decades of experience as an actor and theatre practitioner. This background has honed my sensitivity to collectively-experienced affect, as well as enabling a sharp awareness of my physical relationship to others in the spaces we co-occupy. I habitually take note of the rhythm and tempo of movements in public spaces, the choreographic arrangement of bodies, and the performance tactics through which social characters are enacted, rejected or altered. These sensitivities combine with my intellectual predilections as an IR researcher and shape my understanding of personal experience as it interacts with institutional power.

The performance methods that I undertook within the museum enabled me to consciously imagine and enact a variety of character positions. In the process it became clear that my personal recollections of border control were suffusing my perception of the exhibits. My own personal experiences with British borders – as a non-citizen and migrant living under the ‘Hostile Environment’ – seeped into my consciousness at every turn and coloured my responses to the exhibits. The ‘Hostile Environment’ refers to a set of policies that aim to make everyday life extremely difficult for illegal immigrants in the UK. For individuals who are unable to demonstrate their current legal immigration status, these policies make it difficult to access NHS services, rent accommodation, enrol in educational programmes, or seek employment. While such policies are aimed at tackling illegal immigration, they have widely impacted legal immigrants as well as UK citizens – my own family not excepted. ²⁹

Crucially, the Hostile Environment impacts the way that individuals experience border control sites, as it raises the stakes of the performances that must occur there. While this strongly influenced my experience within the Border Force Museum, I was also consistently aware of the ways that the exhibits called to mind a sense of cultural belonging, through my associations with family members and moments from my past. In the museum I felt a stark sense of being both insider and outsider, embodying two identity positions at once. Faced with subject matter that unexpectedly brought up deeply personal memories and emotions, I began to realise that by embracing my own personal experiences in the museum I might obtain greater insights into its relationship with the theatricality of material borders.

Given this context, performance autoethnography became even more valuable as a tool that would allow me to account for the complex and contradictory responses I experienced within the museum. This value is supported by scholars who suggest that autoethnography can be especially productive when undertaken by researchers who occupy marginalised or liminal positions in relation to their area of study. ³⁰ The fact of being a political interloper in the crowd can position the individual as the lone audience member who laughs when they should be crying, or who leaves the auditorium perplexed when everyone else is raving. The unconscious departure from the interpretations of the crowd can make otherwise unnoticed features apparent. It follows then that performance autoethnographers working amongst the borderlands of political and cultural identities possess unique avenues of perception that enhance their ability to imaginatively embody and interrogate the complexities of live events and practices.

Performance autoethnography also draws upon what Norman K. Denzin refers to as ‘the sting of memory’ ³¹ that occurs during research. It ‘[. . .] focuses on those moments, epiphanies in a person’s life that define a crisis, a turning point that connects a personal trouble, a personal biography, with larger social, public issues.’ ³² Tami Spry notes a shift from participant-observer to a research process that involves the production of creative work as an effect of ‘the fragments and wreckage of experience’, which is then opened up to the participation and engagement of others with the aim of transforming systems of dominance. ³³ In this way, performance autoethnographers deliberately transform their recollections of personal experience into creative representations that are put into wider circulation through theatrical writing or performance. The theatricality of performance autoethnography enables the researcher to selectively and creatively bring into being a representation of research data that is consciously informed by personal crisis or trauma, putting this into dialogue with representations of identities that are produced by frameworks of state and institutional power.

It is this approach that I embraced in my exploration of the Border Force Museum. I visited the museum on five separate occasions between January 2019 and October 2020, seeking to understand the exhibits through the lens of my own personal experience. I made notes during and shortly after my visits, often characterised by creative, theatrical writing, reflecting my observations of the exhibits, my physical and emotional responses, and associations I made with other personal experiences. In addition to written notes, my documentation also included items such as scenographic diagrams, character vignettes and theatrical auto-writing. Throughout my visits, and my reflections after them, I paid close attention to my own physicality – my breathing patterns, proprioception, visceral reactions, and my physical proximity to other people. Out of these engagements, imagined performances took shape. Characters I had thought incidental walk-ons crept onto the pages in front of me to steal the spotlight from others; moods appeared all around me in the form of imagined light, shadows, colours, and rhythms. This process provided the means to dynamically apprehend, document, and communicate the complexities of the Border Force Museum, and its relationship to UK borders.

A Performance Autoethnography of the Border Force National Museum

In this section of the article I deliberately break with the norms of academic writing in favour of the autoethnographic. Scholars who employ such methods often write about the discomfiture they experience while doing so, ³⁴ and my own experience bears this out. Nevertheless, I hope to demonstrate the potential for such methods to reveal the theatrical workings of museum spaces. More specifically, I aim to highlight the elucidatory potential contained in the experiences of visitors who locate themselves in-between or on the fringes of the identities represented in the gallery. In the passages below I make use of three types of writing: first, general descriptions of the museum and its artefacts, written in standard typeface. These are followed by italicised accounts of my personal experience of the museum, with an emphasis on my physical reactions; these sections are based on a synthesis of the notes and reflective writing I produced within the museum and shortly after my visits. Finally, I depict the strong associations that I made with past events or people in my life, which came to my mind when viewing the exhibits – these are written as theatrical scripts, which the reader should imagine appearing hologram-like in the midst of the museum.

First, a short autobiography: I am, in most contexts, a moderately privileged person. I’m a white, English-speaking, North American citizen. I’m also a migrant who underwent a fully immersive experience of the UK Hostile Environment. I haven’t encountered the hardships and traumas faced by people displaced from homelands, forced to travel unimaginable distances to unfamiliar places to seek safety and a future for their loved ones. But I’m also not the kind of migrant who is only theoretically aware of the hardships and traumas that can be faced by people who attempt to move around the globe. I am somewhere in-between. I was not subjected to discrimination or marginalisation on the basis of race, ethnicity or nationality, which are often compounded by hypervisibility; I did experience complications arising from disability, gender, and to some extent, class. My story, if I chose to tell it in full, would be rife with unexpected twists and turns, and some degree of complacency or naïveté on the part of the central character.

But let me back up a bit. I was raised in a small, relatively homogeneous community but my upbringing included a good dose of British culture and customs thanks to the influence of my grandmother, a British war bride. My grandmother was a strong presence in my life, and enthusiastically taught me cockney rhyming slang and the recipe for the perfect plum pudding. Later, I moved to the UK as an undergraduate student, and eventually completed a PhD there. I fell in love with a British citizen, established a network of extended family and friends, and naively considered the UK to be my long-term home.

Enter the Immigration Bill of 2012 and the Hostile Environment policies. Whenever I tell my story to others, I am asked the same incredulous questions. My answers inevitably feel inadequate.

Yes, the government did change the immigration rules with very little warning, and many people fell through the cracks just as we did.

No, getting married wouldn’t have helped.

No, we couldn’t both move to another country.

No, I didn’t have family who could help me.

Yes, it seems difficult for me to believe too.

For several years I picked my way through immigration regulations, attempting to find pathways that would allow me to live with my loved ones in the UK, some of whom depended on my care and could not relocate elsewhere. I hobbled from one fixed-term visa to the next, each costing many hundreds of pounds, counting down my time while worrying about the consequences for my family, if I was forced to leave. I experienced the reluctance of employers to grant interviews to people from non-EU countries; I was once told by a landlord that they don’t let flats to ‘foreigners’; I had one academic employer attempt to (illegally) revoke a job offer when they learned that I was on a fixed term visa; I had my biometric data recorded four, or maybe five times. International travel became something to be avoided at all costs, and when I did need to encounter border control it was always accompanied by a fear of the questions that would be asked, and in some cases my inability to produce the expected answers.

And so I began to understand something of the complex challenges faced by migrants, especially those who do not easily conform to the categories and characteristics proscribed by official policies. Throughout my experiences I have always remained conscious of the privilege that my particular background and circumstances conferred – my nationality, my skin colour, my profession. But my journey made me sensitive to the traumas and frustrations that are experienced by migrants more generally. I ask readers to join me now on a re-enactment of the Border Force Museum, in the hopes that I might share these sensitivities and convey a new understanding of museums and borders along the way.

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On a cold day in late November I am walking out of Lime Street Station and following the tourist signs that point the way to the Maritime Museum, where the Border Force Museum is located. The wind is bitingly cold, and rain pierces my skin through my clothes, stinging me with cold like tiny tacks flying through the air. The seagulls scream overhead and I briefly watch their slick passage through the air, envying, as I always do, the birds’ ability to fly over the earth without noticing its human-imagined borderlines. Finally I reach the Maritime museum, and feel relief to be able to take shelter from the windy weather. I step through the glass doors and look about me to get my bearings. I take a breath and let the warmer air settle around me. I wipe wet strands of hair from where they cling to my face, and shake out my coat to rid it of water. My pace slows as I allow myself to catch my breath. And suddenly, there it is, clearly marked in yellow to the left – ‘Seized! The Border and Customs Uncovered’. The font feels aggressive to me, large and stark against a bright background; but there is also an array of flyers and activity sheets aimed at young children – bright colours and cartoon characters jostle with the Seized graphics. The signs point me downstairs, and I dutifully descend, notebook in hand.

Descending the stairs to the basement, the visitor is immersed in darkness at the entrance to the museum. Once inside, the path is obvious. Visitors wend their way through a corridor-like space following arrows on the floor that show the prescribed order of the exhibits. The lighting is low, with small spotlights illuminating the objects within glass display cases. The first panels discuss taxation, illustrated by images of terraced houses.

I enter the main gallery, passing through a large doorway. There is an air of mystery here, conveyed by the low lights and the message written above the door: ‘Enter a world where things are not what they seem’. I see floor-to-ceiling panels that show lines of typically-British terraced rooftops, with their characteristic slate tiles and ceramic chimney pots. I struggle to understand why they are here in the museum, and I enter the space with my head fixated on them while my body moves around it. The lights are dim here and my eyes need time to adjust. For a fleeting moment my mind makes a surreal association with the classic British soap opera, Coronation Street, and its iconic opening titles that feature terraced rooftops and a quintessential Northern British streetscape. I hear the theme tune in my mind, with its long, sliding cornet notes. . .

Conclusion

The theatrical account above is intended to creatively suggest a sense of the Border Force Museum’s exhibits, and particularly the ways that they reflect the theatrical manifestation of real-world international border crossing. Although the performance autoethnography might stand alone as a dissemination of knowledge about the museum, in this concluding section I seek to highlight the unique benefits of performance autoethnography that were revealed through my research process. I then summarise the key points that these methods uncovered about the Border Force Museum, and ways that such approaches might be carried forward in future research.

Perhaps most significantly, this research reaffirmed the potential for performance autoethnography to provide a means of imaginatively occupying multiple subject positions during museum-based research. Because theatrical performance naturally provides a platform for multiple characterisations and duality of perspectives, it offers a medium for researchers to explore the complex and sometimes contradictory demands that museums place on visitors. In the same way that international borders are experienced differently depending upon one’s citizenship status, a museum’s content and layout also affect visitors in varying ways. By engaging in performance processes, researchers can creatively embody differing perspectives and thus gain more nuanced understandings of the ways that visitors’ experiences are shaped. In my case I made extensive use of my own sense of identification with a hybrid character, someone who is simultaneously the British insider and the suspect immigrant; but similar approaches might be taken up by researchers regardless of their own personal identities or subject positions.

Furthermore, performance autoethnography encourages researchers to physically embody the various affective dimensions that might be imagined for different characters. Performance is a process that implicates a researcher’s entire body, and as a result the impact of a museum can be experienced in more physical and material ways than other methods might facilitate. What results is a different understanding of the role of affect within museum spaces. As we imaginatively embody characters in different scenarios, we are inevitably aware of the ways that our bodies encounter and react to phenomena. This gives rise to a more acute understanding of the relationship between the physical staging of exhibits and the affective elements of visitor interpretation – and in turn, this has great potential to cut through the institutional creations of meaning that otherwise drive our interpretation of spaces and events.

These points were borne out by the insights that my creative autoethnography revealed about the Border Force Museum. Fundamentally, the museum’s artefacts are largely comprised of everyday objects and familiar cultural references – streetscapes, personal possessions, toys, food and drink, etc. My performance-based methods enabled me to understand how these objects are not simply mundane and commonplace; rather, they operate as powerful signals of identity and belonging which support the museum’s messages about border security. When focusing on a character driven by an insider-identity, these objects gave rise to associations with family members or friends, and sometimes a sense of pride attached to a notion of shared cultural belonging. Conversely, when objects were approached through the character of the outsider-immigrant, they evoked a sense of distance from other museum visitors, predicated on feelings of exclusion.

Furthermore, the museum overall stresses the existence of security threats and positions border control as a vital protecting force. Throughout the museum, visitors are prompted to take up an attitude of scrutiny as the exhibits fluctuate between reminders of homelife and family to depictions of security threats, leading visitors to progress to each new display case with a heightened sense of suspicion. Notably, these depictions of risk are often paired with raced, gendered, and enabled imagery. When my performance methods concentrated on embodied memories of ‘Britishness’, I was only theoretically cognizant of these features. Conversely, when I focused on a character associated with my experiences of exclusion from British borders, I found that the themes of risk and scrutiny had a marked impact on my emotional responses. It became clear that for visitors who might feel alienated or excluded from the dominant ‘insider’ characters that the museum depicts, the only option is to imagine oneself as a target of border control investigations, fearful of one’s ability to prove one’s worth and thus be allowed ‘inside’.

Overall then, the museum effectively separates bodies into those who rightfully belong inside British borders and those who must be excluded as threats to security and economic prosperity. This is achieved in part through emotionally-impactful visual imagery – but significantly, the hierarchical sorting of insiders and outsiders is greatly aided by the role that physical stimuli play within the museum. Throughout my research, many of the exhibits I looked at were experienced as sensations on my skin, in my stomach, through my spine – regardless of which elements of my identity I was creatively evoking through my imagined performance. I concluded that this attention to physicality is produced through the museum’s unique combination of visual imagery and interactive displays. For example, the images of x-rayed bodies provide reminders of physical vulnerability, further heightened by graphic text that celebrates surveillance terminologies; the interactive games orient the bodies of visitors around the gaming machines, and visitors find themselves becoming mechanical extensions of the games themselves, moving tensely and jerkily in response to the flashing lights on screens and their immersion in the tense narratives of the game-worlds. The combined effect is that our live experience of the museum is one that draws attention to our personal physical bodies and the bodies of those who share the space with us.

Ultimately, this leads to amplified perceptions of a binary logic of security and risk. These perceptions are experienced differently depending on the subject position one occupies, and the extent to which someone might successfully enact the dominant characters that the museum prescribes. For visitors who find it easy to identify as an insider, the museum might provide a pleasurable and validating experience, even as it asks them to indulge in moments of security-related anxiety; for those more likely to be deemed outsider, it reinforces feelings of vulnerability, exclusion and fear. Due to the intensity of the museum’s physical-sensory elements, these experiences constitute heightened, and therefore highly theatrical, orderings of border-related identities – and this directly mirrors the heightened theatricality of real-world borders.

By playing with the delineated roles of insider and outsider, I was able to better understand how those characters are constructed and experienced in both real-world border crossings and their representations in the Border Force Museum. This suggests that additional performance autoethnography by scholars from a wider range of diverse backgrounds is vital to understanding these issues with greater nuance. By deliberately emphasising embodied interpretations that depart from majority viewpoints, we might gain crucial insights about performance in border-related museum exhibits; we might also garner new knowledge about the function of performance in the construction of international borders in the world beyond the gallery.

Given that the museum’s exhibits possess the potential to further the discriminatory and exclusionary features of immigration policy and border control, it seems all the more important to conclude this article by returning to the notion that performance autoethnography facilitates ongoing, collaborative generation of knowledge. I invite readers now to reflect on their own experience of reading my account of the Border Force Museum, and draw impressions – or creations – of their own. Perhaps by doing so, the potential for personal experience to offer critical challenges to institutional power might be maximised. Furthermore, our collective understanding of the theatricality of borders – and their representations in museum spaces – can be moved forward in a horizontally-collaborative fashion that directly contradicts the ways that power operates at border control sites.