Narratives as cultural heritage. Power and resistance in collections and narratives about persons categorized as immigrants at the archive of the Nordic Museum

Archives and museums are not sites of passive curation, but of active decision-making, where the staffs of the memory institutions themselves are constantly involved in processes that shape the materials from which history and cultural heritage is created. Cultural heritage is constructed when different actors decide to consider an artefact or a narrative as cultural heritage to be preserved. Its construction and preservation ties people together in time and space. The process of cultural heritage creation creates a sense of community among people, but retrospectively it also entails a risk of excluding other minorities. This project investigates how memory institutions contribute to construct and dissolve the boundaries of the Swedish community by including or excluding persons categorized as immigrants in the construction processes of cultural heritage. The study is exploring one Swedish example in empirical detail: the archives of the Nordic Museum and its creation of narrative collections about and with persons positioned as immigrants or ethnic minorities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.