This paper examines digital technology in c̓əsnaʔəm, a series of exhibitions located in Vancouver and focused on the Musqueam people and their belongings. It considers challenges to traditional museum exhibition posed by the unique structure and motive behind c̓əsnaʔəm, asking how new meanings can be constructed with a combination of old materials and digital technology. C̓əsnaʔəm is an exhibition series that spans three institutions, and which makes a rhetorical shift from the terminology of ‘objects’ and ‘artifacts’ towards that of ‘belongings’. This distinction is considered through a comparison to Bruno Latour’s object-oriented philosophy, through which the question of how exhibition interacts with memory is considered in c̓əsnaʔəm. The series also makes significant use of interactive and digital components, considered within this paper using Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric. To consider c̓əsnaʔəm in the context of other curatorial efforts, this paper then conducts a comparative examination of c̓əsnaʔəm alongside museum-based studies by Ott, Aoki and Dickinson. The focus of this paper, using the above frameworks, is the examination of concepts of memory, interaction, absence, and amnesia, and how they are rendered in museum installations. This paper considers how the composition and components of these installations work rhetorically to convey a Musqueam worldview and historical perspective. It argues that c̓əsnaʔəm presents textual choices that build on both its form as an exhibition and its status as a text belonging to Musqueam to allow visitors to engage in a rhetoric dependent on reflection.

KEYWORDS: Musqueam, Museum, Rhetoric


C̓əsnaʔəm is many things; c̓əsnaʔəm is a home to many belongings of the Musqueam nation. C̓əsnaʔəm was an ancient village, located on land known in a settler context as the Marpole Midden. In 2012, c̓əsnaʔəm was the site of a 100-day vigil to protect and preserve Musqueam heritage, in the wake of archaeological exploitation and development efforts. In 2015, a series of three museum exhibits titled c̓əsnaʔəm: the city before the city were launched, using digital technologies and interactive displays in their installations to share an interconnected Indigenous history.

The c̓əsnaʔəm exhibits were launched across three different museums, the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC, the Musqueam Cultural Education Resource Center (MCERC), and the museum of Vancouver (MOV). Focusing on the MOA exhibition in 2015, this paper offers a Latourian analysis of the exhibition’s treatment of featured items as ‘belongings,’ a term which connects a physical object to a relationship of heritage and responsibility (Wilson 2016). A Latourian approach on object-focused discourse relies on a close reading of the media used to frame objects in c̓əsnaʔəm, which this paper conducts through descriptive commentary on the MOA exhibition. In this scope, this paper focuses on the use of digital technology to produce a rhetorical effect. Relying on theories of technology as rhetoric and Bruno Latour’s object-oriented philosophy, this paper considers how c̓əsnaʔəm builds on traditional museum exhibitions.

The exhibition series presents Musqueam cultural heritage in three ways that shape the presentation of its installations. First, featured items are described as ‘belongings’ rather than as ‘objects’ or ‘artifacts,’ connecting them to the relationships and cultural contexts that provide textual meaning to these items. Second, these materials are framed in interfaces enabled by digital technologies. Finally, the series places these materials within a reinterpretation of Vancouver within the scale of a history that predates the city. These textual choices are made in c̓əsnaʔəm in a way that asserts Indigenous ontology within the museum space. In trying to portray “the city before the city,” c̓əsnaʔəm “[leaves] the visitor with a different understanding of the deep history of what is now known as Metro Vancouver” (Museum of Anthropology at UBC, para. 4). The exhibition makes use of a rhetoric that draws from Musqueam cultural heritage, and the history of political protests made to protect this heritage, on the space of c̓əsnaʔəm.

This rhetorical reading of c̓əsnaʔəm considers two key interactions embedded in its form. First, I begin with discussion of the exhibitions’ use of ‘belongings’ as a core term, and how it connects to a Musqueam worldview. I use Bruno Latour’s concept of the ‘Ding,’ or ‘thing’ as an actant in a socio-political context, to discuss how the exhibitions engage cultural memory through physical materials. I then discuss how this type of actant can take the form of visual artifacts through Laurie Gries’ work. Second, I discuss the interactive displays of the exhibition through Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric, discussing the effect of a rhetorical appeal embedded in immersive actions in a museum space. Bogost’s analytical framework is used in discussion to reflect on commentary from the exhibition curators on a display titled ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ[1], a “tangible table” that requires a series of interactions with material replicas to prompt information in a digital interface.

To discuss the significance of the c̓əsnaʔəm project as an example of rhetoric in curation, this paper enters a brief comparative analysis using a pair of case studies by Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson.[2] These studies focus on the rhetorical significance of material absences, and on how these absences create an effect of cultural amnesia or sanitization within the museum. In discussing c̓əsnaʔəm, a project that illustrates a history beyond Vancouver, and which constitutes connections between traditional Musqueam concepts and contemporary practices, a broad consideration of material absences helps prompt a set of key critical questions: What connections are informed by material presence? How do digitized information and interactions illustrate these connections? How can these connections help communicate an Indigenous cultural memory? Finally, how does a museum installation like c̓əsnaʔəm allude to its roots in recent political protest?

This paper, then, through a scholarly review of all three c̓əsnaʔəm exhibits, examines concepts of memory, interaction, absence, and amnesia. By examining how these are rendered into installations in c̓əsnaʔəm, this paper engages a larger discussion of how cultural heritage is embedded into materials, and how these materials may embody a rhetorical appeal. In c̓əsnaʔəm, this takes the form of paying homage to ‘belongings’, a form of responsibility that demands the preservation of cultural heritage. This paper argues that processes of interaction and object-focused memory are a significant part of the rhetorical power in c̓əsnaʔəm.

Belongings and the Latourian ‘Ding’

Jordan Wilson, co-curator of c̓əsnaʔəm, reflects in a post-exhibition blog entry,

“…our use of the term belongings has multiple intentions: it is a political expression, but aligns with our ways of knowing; it pertains to both the historic and the contemporary; and it connects the intangible with the tangible. It is meant to communicate to the museum visitor our ongoing connection to the past…” (2016).

In c̓əsnaʔəm, the use of belongings as a key term connects items on display with an understanding of these items as part of Musqueam heritage. Such items embody a connection between past and present, not only through the continuity of traditions and practices, but also through a sense of responsibility to protect such items. As Wilson describes, this is crucial to a Musqueam understanding of respecting one’s ancestors. The term gains further political weight when one considers what it means to belong. The items featured in c̓əsnaʔəm belong to the original village site, to the Musqueam community, and to a wider continuity of cultural heritage and ownership (Wilson, para. 17).

The idea of belongings resonates with object-oriented philosophies, as described by Bruno Latour. To Latour, objects take on significance beyond what they can be recognized or described (From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, 9). Rather, they also embody political and social connections that assemble around them (12-13). To describe this, Latour uses the term “thing”, or “Ding”. Latour, in discussing Dingpolitik, lists a key condition towards treating an object as a ‘thing’, which is reflected in the rhetorical aspects of the term ‘belongings’ in c̓əsnaʔəm. To Latour, “objects become things… when matters of fact give way to their complicated entanglements and become matters of concern…” (31). In this sense, Latour contrasts matters of fact, in other words, how an object is observable or described, with matters of concern, or how an object represents an issue that demands a gathering, often political, to be settled (Matters of Fact, Matters of Concern, 233). This criterion is visible in the framing of history in the c̓əsnaʔəm exhibitions. Both the Latourian Ding and the concept of belongings rely on the social contexts surrounding a given item, which inform the capacity for said item to act within a political context. To frame belongings, c̓əsnaʔəm relies on a set of relational meanings that are assembled around materials much as one would frame the Latourian Ding. Where this consideration takes on more force is in the context of protest and preservation surrounding the original village site named c̓əsnaʔəm.

To use the word ‘belonging’ suggests a relational connection between a given item and a wider context. Wilson points out that the Musqueam ontology surrounding c̓əsnaʔəm links respect for material belongings to respect for teachings and traditions. To care for these belongings is to pay respects to one’s ancestors (2016). Similarly, a belonging is not an item that belongs to an individual person; rather, it belongs to a culture and embodies its heritage, much as a human actor might. The Latourian Ding is defined in its capacity as an actant, which to Latour is “… something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general.” (On Actor-Network Theory, 7). Items featured in the c̓əsnaʔəm installations have this capacity as entities assembled as evidence for a particular understanding of the world. Yet, as belongings, they have significance in terms of responsibilities they are owed; in the ways in which they are “of concern.”

The Latourian perspective is useful in the discussion of c̓əsnaʔəm; however, when it comes to a focus on rhetorical impacts. Laurie Gries observes in “Dingrhetoriks” that “…things are different than objects in that things acquire power to shape reality as they become entangled in complex relations with other actants” (298). Within the museum, belongings featured in c̓əsnaʔəm are connected to political history that is significant in the context of a wider debate on relations between the state and indigenous peoples in North America. They acquire through this connection the power to support and make the claim that motivates c̓əsnaʔəm; that there was a “city before the city”. Gries in her analytical case focuses on the ability of visual artifacts to channel such connections, suggesting an approach of description (296-297). Though the c̓əsnaʔəm exhibitions feature audio and haptic components in addition to visual artifacts, description is a useful point at which to start discussion of its formal components – and from which to evaluate the ‘complex relations,’ as Gries describes, between c̓əsnaʔəm’s materials and the larger cultural context which shapes its rhetorical power.

For Gries, using Latour’s terms, things are mediators, rather than intermediaries, of human intents (297-298).[3] Here, this paper draws primarily on the connotation that belongings in c̓əsnaʔəm have the capacity to create rhetorical meaning and to influence intent. They embody this inherently for the Musqueam community, through an understanding of responsibilities and preservation, but where do they make a rhetorical impact on a visitor to the exhibits? An examination of c̓əsnaʔəm as an organized set of actants could focus on the ways in which visitors are challenged to reflect on what they know, and what they are invited to learn.

One way to observe how these challenges are enacted is to consider how memory and interaction figure into the exhibition series through the narration of a visitor. Lyana Patrick, who visited the MOA exhibit of c̓əsnaʔəm narrates her first impressions of the MOA exhibit,

“As I walk past glass panels and white wooden posts created to emulate a Coast Salish longhouse, I hear the voice of s?əyələq (Larry Grant)… welcoming me to the space, letting me know that ‘in the ways of our ancestors, we accompany you here.’ … [a] video at the entrance to MOA’s exhibit explains to visitors that ‘c̓əsnaʔəm tells us who we are.’” (2-3).

The welcome provided by Larry Grant, a Musqueam elder, marks an appeal to ancestral tradition. Patrick observes that the initial display initiates connections to Musqueam land, teachings, language, and history, linking the identity of the Musqueam people to the cultural site framed by c̓əsnaʔəm (3). These connections are enabled and mediated by the display, not to be imposed on Patrick, but to be considered as she continues through the exhibition.

The passivity of the museum display means that sometimes, visitors might forego engagement. As Patrick observes, “…some people took time to watch and absorb the welcome. Others hurried by into the main exhibit room. …if visitors missed this essential point of contact, they would miss much of the intent behind the rest of the exhibit” (3-4).  The structuring of the exhibition’s entrance creates the sense of an emergent moment; one is invited to step into the room and is not bound to stay at the door to listen. This quality bears value within what Jeremy Tirrell terms the “Latourian memoria”, which “embraces a momentary kairotic assembly rather than a chronos-driven durable archive” (176). Kairos, as Tirrell considers it through the Latourian framework, can be easily found in the museum space. As a sense of momentary and opportunistic possibility, kairos can be used to examine the museum exhibit, where visitors bring an immense variety of possible past experiences into dialogue with the items on display and the very organization of these items. The objects in c̓əsnaʔəm are belongings passed through Musqueam history, but they instruct present practices for the Musqueam people. Kairotic possibility in c̓əsnaʔəm invites, rather than imposes, a rhetorical engagement with the belongings featured in the exhibition. Beyond a sense of discovery and encounter that can be described through kairos, the exhibition also creates moments of interaction that have rhetorical possibility.

Procedural Interaction and the Tangible Table

Ian Bogost, writing about persuasive text, observes that the goal of writers and artists in contemporary rhetoric has shifted from “the simple achievement of desired ends” to “the effective arrangement of a work so as to create a desirable possibility space for interpretation” (20). A quick consideration of the composition and interactive forms in c̓əsnaʔəm suggests that this goal is common to curators as well. Beyond the entrance to the MOA exhibition, Patrick describes a series of posters bearing photographs and quoted text generally similar in form to other museum exhibits, yet these posters are organized under and made to animate “twelve concepts from the hən̓ q̓ əmin̓ əm̓ language” (4). Near the posters is “a computerized timeline in the exhibit [which] shows the development over 9000 years of Coast Salish villages and colonial settlements.” (5). This timeline is notable in that it represents the translation of a history passed down through oral history and material traces into a digital interface; it represents a materialization of previously immaterial knowledge.[4]

Patrick later describes the “kitchen table” exhibit, noting that “there is a room with a kitchen table, photographs displayed on top, four chairs around it, with four more in each corner of the room. A recording plays a conversation among six Musqueam community members…” (9). The kitchen table display is one that creates, as with many other parts of c̓əsnaʔəm, an emphasis on slowing down and listening. Around the kitchen table, various components of the display act upon visitors. Voices are projected from speakers placed around the room, mapping the relative locations of the original conversation onto the exhibit. The arrangement of the space is crucial to how it functions with voices, chairs, photographs, and the table itself helping to immerse the visitor in a simulated conversation.

Thinking back on Patrick’s descriptions of displays in c̓əsnaʔəm, pacing becomes a useful consideration. In spaces like the entrance and the kitchen table, visitors are made to slow down by the set duration of auditory media, which constrains visitors to an immediate proximity if they intend to encounter a whole and continuous experience. With the kitchen table, visitors are invited to sit, enacting a physical stillness that is part of the experience of listening to a conversation. In contrast, the twelve hən̓ q̓ əmin̓ əm̓ concept posters and the digital timeline are experienced at a variable speed as a visitor views them. They are not accompanied by the inviting quality of sound as it spreads through the exhibition space, nor the constraining factor of the duration of a recording.

Alongside his focus on arrangement, Bogost provides a framework using process, interactivity, and procedural rhetoric in his analysis of games that are useful in examining the curated experience of museum displays.  Bogost writes, “processes define the way things work: the methods, techniques, and logics that drive the operation of systems. Rhetoric refers to effective and persuasive expression. Procedural rhetoric, then, is a practice of using processes persuasively” (2-3). In museums as spatial arrangements, how might the exhibition be viewed as a system, and how can this system shape the interactions of visitors with the space of exhibition?

Bogost focuses on the persuasive effects of such interactions as he discusses procedural rhetoric. To Bogost, such rhetoric “…requires inscription in a medium that actually enacts processes rather than merely describe them” (9). He notes from there that “procedural tropes often take the form of common models of user interaction” (13). Where the exhibition does demand interaction is in a display titled ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ, translated as “belongings”. ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ is described in the exhibit as an “interactive tangible tabletop display” (MOA, 360). Upon the table, replicas of ancient belongings are used to visualize culture and traditional practices (362); in ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ, these replicas, and the table itself, act as an interface for visitors to access information in the exhibit by moving through certain series of interactions.

The system is described by its creators as containing six belongings from the original c̓əsnaʔəm site, accompanied by two activator rings on top of a table. As a belonging is placed within the rings, monitors framing the exhibit display contextual information and images of similar items from a collections database. A belonging can also be placed on an image of fish-cutting that spans the entire table – if placed in the correct location, additional information related to its use and cultural significance is displayed. Finally, ancient belongings can be placed with their contemporary counterparts – if two counterparts are placed in the activator rings, a series of texts, testimonies, and records appear on the table. This last possibility demonstrates how traditions remain part of the everyday life of Musqueam culture today (Muntean et al. 364-365)

The process embodied in ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ is procedural, in that it directs users to enact an associative and organizational set of movements to discover information from the exhibit.  The way in which ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ is displayed relies on users to make connections for themselves, in an open space shaped by the already-present images and belongings. Bogost points out that that a similar kind of openness is useful to the endeavor of procedural rhetoric. Calling on the Aristotelian enthymeme, he states that “the enthymeme, we will remember, is the technique in which a proposition in a syllogism is omitted; the listener (in the case of oratory) is expected to fill in the missing proposition and complete the claim” (43). The tangible table makes use of an enthymemetic process, as users by this point in the exhibition know of belongings, and of the city before the city, and have been exposed to other displays seeking to answer fragmentation with continuity. In making use of the process of ‘filling in the blanks’ that characterizes the enthymeme, ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ is a deployment of procedural rhetoric unique to the museum space which adds significant persuasive possibility to the c̓əsnaʔəm exhibition. As a set of interactions embedded in the larger experience of moving through the museum, the tangible table invites visitors towards further reflection about the interconnectedness of the exhibition. In a wider sense, visitors are also pushed to ‘fill in the blank’ about the history and politics of place that predate Vancouver as a city.

Grounds for Comparison: Absence and Amnesia

Yet, in creating a structured and responsive set of interactions, c̓əsnaʔəm necessarily makes use of a rather limited range of selection. Though this is inherent to curatorial projects, the absence of an artifact or perspective has been used as criticism for museum exhibits in the past. Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson wrote extensively on this issue, focusing on the Cody Firearms Museum (CFM) and the Plains Indian Museum (PIM) in Wyoming. The examination of their case studies in relation to c̓əsnaʔəm brings into focus considerations on the dynamic of presence and absence in curation, and on the dangers of rhetorical sanitization in cases of omission.

Ott et al. begin their critique of the CFM by discussing how its rhetorical effectiveness is bound in tension to what is present and to what is absent, and how what is present is organized to emphasize a visual mode of experience, removed from other sensory modes like the auditory. Ott et al. end this section by stating that “what is absent from the museum… is conspicuously absent” (216). For Ott et al., “conspicuous absence,” or absence that represses the association of an object to powerful emotional contexts, is an important concern in the museum space. A Latourian framework might suggest that this sort of absence occurs when an object is taken away from the contexts that make it an issue or focus of a discursive gathering. This consideration resonates with Ott et al.’s own analysis of the CFM, as they write of a principle of surveillance that underlies the CFM. They describe how one is “to see in a distanced, ‘objective’ way, to exercise a timeless, if occluded gaze… the looked-at-object cannot return the gaze and therefore the look is unidirectional and non-transactional” (217). In the CFM, items on display are matters of fact rather than matters of concern. They are removed from what makes them worth feeling about. Rhetorically, this weakens the possibilities that exist in a museum space.

Ott et al. continue their analysis on a sensory level that “museumgoers are encouraged to studiously examine [the guns on display] … the sounds typically associated with guns are nowhere to be heard… Visitors are invited to forget not only the unique bang of a gunshot, but also the distinctive odor of gunpowder” (224-225). Bearing this examination in mind, one might observe that the tangible table does not bring out the scent of fresh salmon during preparation, or that not all text in c̓əsnaʔəm is spoken. In thinking through the dynamics of absence, gaps can only be identified by what one knows already; in thinking about what is present, it is always apparent that an item rendered in a museum exhibit has been removed and fragmented from its context of origin. It is crucial to observe here that Ott et al. situate their critique on the basis that the CFM’s focus on exclusively visual displays  is borne of “the rhetorics of domestication and sterility”, which emphasizes a “directed, distanced, and seemingly ‘‘objective,’’ sense of vision” (228).

C̓əsnaʔəm is organized in a way that deeply contrasts this description of the CFM. The belongings in the c̓əsnaʔəm series are not physically able to return a gaze, yet they are given the capacity to call out visitors through auditory cues; they demand physical movement as interaction, and they are situated within an exhibition organized to emphasize the interconnectedness and continual sense of ownership that informs visitors why the belongings on display matter and necessitate a sense of responsibility. Indeed, in his post-exhibition blog, Wilson quotes his colleague and cousin as stating, “our ancestors are on the other side, watching how we are treating their things” (2016). The consideration of items as belongings in c̓əsnaʔəm, and the effort to make use of interaction and reactivity in the exhibition series represent a possible answer to the danger of ‘conspicuous absence’ by rendering the immaterial into sensory experience. ‘Conspicuous absence’ is avoided by the conspicuous presence of items on display as part of an arrangement that affirms a continual responsibility to respect Musqueam cultural heritage and worldview. What is present is also informed by the political tensions of the protest that came before the exhibits. Where the CFM sanitizes and removes contexts of significance from what it puts on display, c̓əsnaʔəm is arranged to emphasize why belongings on display matter.

Moving onto discussion of the PIM, Dickinson et al.[5] examine an installation that, despite having “…interactive touch screens, automated audio recordings, wall-sized video displays, and fully immersive, living environments” (28), results in an “anthropological, technological, and amnesiac mode of looking that sees the Plains Indians as culturally, naturally, and historically distant as Other” (33). They point to the presence of a “discourse of reverence” that occludes colonial history by presenting pre-interpreted and sanitized narratives of past events (28-29; 36). An important quality that Dickinson et al. identify in their discussion of museums is that visits to them are “diffuse” experiences, that blend between a visitor’s pre-existing understandings and circumstances, and the structured arrangement of the exhibits themselves (29). When an exhibition tries to present what is on display as separate from the outside world, it creates an amnesic effect, regardless of the arrangements and interactions it contains.

C̓əsnaʔəm, on the other hand, creates a space from which visitors are invited to reflect on the experiences they bring with them, and to think about the socio-cultural contexts beyond its installations. It is structured to help visitors think about the relationships between items on display and the history that makes them matter. This happens in several ways. Key to this is the exhibition’s treatment of objects as belongings, drawn from Musqueam worldview on responsibilities owed to cultural heritage through preservation. C̓əsnaʔəm makes use of auditory and interactive textual modes in addition to the items and descriptions on display, immersing visitors in a procedural generation of meaning. Finally, c̓əsnaʔəm is not a single exhibit, but rather a series. Witnessed in different contexts, including MOA at UBC, the Museum of Vancouver, and the Musqueam cultural center, visitors may reflect on the different textual choices made in each iteration of the exhibit. The c̓əsnaʔəm exhibits make effective use of their form as exhibits by working with, rather than excluding, the contexts that surround them. As a direct challenge to contemporary and everyday understandings of Vancouver that invites visitors to learn for themselves, the exhibitions create a discourse not of reverence, but of respect.


This analysis began in considering Bruno Latour’s concept of Ding in relation to c̓əsnaʔəm’s framing of items as belongings. Both concepts moved physical materials beyond the status of objects to address the social connections and power that they possess, and the ability of materials to trouble notions of time and sequence. It moved into the consideration of Gries’ Dingrhetorik, which was used to examine the rhetorical power of connection in the form of the exhibitions. Using Latourian memoria, a concept developed by Jeremy Tirrell, this paper considered, during a walkthrough of the MOA exhibition, and how these connections create a kairotic formation of memory, derived through the combination of human and nonhuman actions networked together in a space of reinterpretation. Considering how this was accomplished, Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric enabled examination of the interactions that formed several immersive displays within the MOA exhibition. Procedural rhetoric provided grounds to compare c̓əsnaʔəm to other curatorial efforts which were examined through the work of Brian Ott et al.

c̓əsnaʔəm draws upon an ontology that acknowledges the past and the world around the exhibit as essential to its meaning. It contains textual choices that act rhetorically upon visitors by inviting them to interact in a space shaped to reflect on the world outside. It calls visitors to action, recalling the vigil that inspired the exhibits in the first place and the troubled colonial history that led in turn to the vigil. C̓əsnaʔəm, as a text, deserves focus towards its rhetorical aspects and could be explored further with an approach grounded in a deeper understanding of Musqueam ontology. A cross-cultural analysis that begins here could acknowledge more specific practices, understandings, and traditions that inform the exhibition in ways I am ill-equipped to discuss. C̓əsnaʔəm invites reflection in this way as well.

Ken Ip
The University of British Columbia

1. ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ translates as “belongings”

2. Published as Ott et al. and Dickinson et al.

3. Gries relies on a binary between human mediators and nonhuman intermediaries to explain this point. Of significant note is that within many Indigenous ontologies in North America the division of entities into human/nonhuman is not a given assumption. Rather, a concept of personhood would be useful to consider.

4.  A previous version of this paper discussed how a Latourian consideration of an object’s political weight would be “freed from its obsession with the time of Succession” (From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, 31), and how this reflects on the reframing of time in the c̓əsnaʔəm exhibit. The imposition of a timeline, and thus a sequence, deserves more discussion, as pointed out by a kind reviewer.

5.  Dickinson has first author credit for this paper; this is the same team consisting of Ott, Aoki and Dickinson.


Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007.

C̓əsnaʔəm, The City before the City. Museum of Anthropology at UBC,             https://www.moa.ubc.ca/exhibition/c̓əsnaʔəm-the-city-before-the-city/. Accessed 04 Jan. 2019.

Dickinson, Greg, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki. “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2006, pp. 27.

Gries, Laurie. “Dingrhetoriks”. Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. Edited by Lynch, Paul, et al. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2015. pp. 294-309

Latour, Bruno. “From realpolitik to dingpolitik; Or, how to make things public.” Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Edited by Latour, Bruno, and Weibel, Peter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, pp. 14–41. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/96-DINGPOLITIK-GB.pdf Accessed 20 Jan. 2019.

Latour, Bruno. “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications.” Soziale Welt, vol. 47, no. 4, 1996, pp. 369-381.

Latour, Bruno. “Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? from Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, pp. 225-248.

Muntean, Reese, et al. “ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ – Belongings: Tangible Interactions with Intangible Heritage.” Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, vol. 7, no. 2, 2015, pp. 59-69.

Ott, Brian L., Eric Aoki, and Greg Dickinson. “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 2011, pp. 215-239.

Patrick, Lyana. “c̓əsnaʔəm, the City before the City: A Review of Historical Thinking Concepts in the Museum of Anthropology Exhibit”. Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library, 2015.

Tirrell, Jeremy. “Latourian Memoria”. Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. Edited by Lynch, Paul, et al. Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, 2015. pp. 165-182

Wilson, Jordan. “‘Belongings’ in c̓əsnaʔəm: the City before the City.” Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage, http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/outputs/blog/citybeforecitybelongings/. Accessed 06 Jan. 2019.