The trend in museum anthropology and practice towards the topics of future and migration is evident in the current exhibition landscape as well as in various recent publications. The contribution shows how these two topics are linked in the German museum exhibition complex and which images of migratory futures are emerging. As exhibition complex, I understand a network of actors, practices, discourses, infrastructures and materialities that entangles museum as an institution. It is understood as a kind of setting in which certain knowledge regimes operate in power/knowledge relations (Bennet 1995). Using different examples from my recent fieldwork, I demonstrate how images of migratory futures are negotiated in exhibition practice: What images can be made out in the exhibition complex? How and under which conditions are images of a future migration society created in the exhibition complex? And how do they affect the knowledge production of migration? According to my thesis, these effects can be traced with the methodological programme of a knowledge regime analysis. Knowledge regimes are “historically changing arenas of action and formation” (Pott and Tsianos 2014, 121) which emerge as the “result of power relations and competitive struggles between knowledge actors and the forms of knowledge represented by them” (Wehling 2007, 706). The approach of knowledge regime research aims to grasp changes in knowledge production and analyse them in interaction with social processes. On the one hand, the talk will provide an insight into the exhibition complex of migration in Germany, focusing in particular on images of the future. On the other hand, there will be a theoretical and methodological introduction to approaches of an ethnographic knowledge regime analysis of migration.
