Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance Research

Martha Roberts
Religious Studies
UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation research at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles focused on the ways that religious, racial, and ethnic diversity are exhibited and internalized by tourists and visitors to the popular California museum. The dissertation investigated the production and reception of the encounters between diverse peoples in exhibit spaces, the myriad of ways in which those encounters are received and interpreted by visitors, and the understandings of religious diversity that they engender within Californian culture. It explored the ways that the Museum’s tolerance education programs use strategies that focus on the display of the body as central to the encounter between groups. Using historical and sociological methods (participant-observation fieldwork, interviews, surveys, and qualitative analysis) this interdisciplinary study articulated how effective use of bodily display can create encounters that overcome differences and prejudices in the real world—both inside and outside this Californian exhibition space.