Religion as a social category comes to matter in the construction of national identity, belonging, and history, when articulated as a collective heritage. Museums specializing in the theme of migration further foreground this process by institutionalizing the dynamic interplay between the categories religion, migrants, and heritage. This study therefore asks how these categories are created, used, maintained, contested, and made absent in museum situations. In this sense, too, museums function as a site where religion-as-heritage is produced and used as a resource for ordering historical depth, difference, exclusion, and belonging.

The analysis focuses on how human and non-human actors and practices dynamically interact to produce meanings of migration and religion-as-cultural heritage within specific museum situations. This study pays particular attention to the aesthetic, material and affective elements through which religion is reproduced and enacted. 

In this ethnographic case study, the elements to analyze include, among others, discourses on migration, material objects, visual and spatial arrangements, exhibition designs, sounds, and artistic forms through which religion is made present, transformed into heritage, or silenced within migration narratives. These sensory dimensions shape how visitors feel and make sense of migration. Additionally, curatorial processes and institutional rationalities will also be factored in as part of the institutionalizing elements.