Staging the museum: Script intersections and heritage communication in the digital age

This article reconceptualises the museum as a planetary relational field and advances a creative research design using academic theatre. It introduces script intersections to describe how scientific preservation, ancestral dignity, restitution justice, ecological ethics, philanthropy, and consumer spectacle overlap and compete within museum encounters. Structured as a three-act play, the study personifies artefacts, human remains, natural specimens, curators, visitors, officials, donors, and publics, including a Collector from the 1840s and a Public Sphere from the 2020s, to stage contested negotiations of legitimacy, memory, and belonging at institutions such as the British Museum. The analysis draws on digital ethnography of Xiaohongshu posts and reflexive field observation, showing how platform publics re-voice heritage through tropes of national treasure and homecoming while also celebrating conservation as care. The article proposes a planetisation turn in intercultural communication that extends analysis beyond inter-human dialogue to human-object-platform-planet entanglements. Theatricalisation functions as method and argument, holding evidence, affect, and analysis together to reimagine museums as stages where intercultural authority is unsettled and futures of accountability are negotiated.