1 Forthcoming in: V. Gosselin & P. Livingstone (editors). Museums as Sites of Historical Consciousness: Perspectives on museum theory and practice in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Chapter Six Changing Views? Emotional Intelligence, Registers of Engagement and the Museum Visit Laurajane Smith The idea that museums can produce transformative moments or experiences for their visitors is a common assumption in the museums literature. 1 How these moments are set in motion and experienced, and what they mean for the visitor, are neither well documented nor satisfactorily theorised in the museums/heritage literature. This chapter aims to explore the idea of the transformative moment, and is based on research (in- progress at the time of writing) 2 with visitors to museums and other heritage sites. These moments are characterised by deep engagement, not simply with the museum but with the emotional or affective responses the museum, and the act of visiting itself, can engender (see Collin, Cousson, Daignault in this volume for a complementary discussion on visitor meaning making). They are also marked by some level of change in a visitor’s views or understanding. The idea of registers of engagement is useful in understanding these transformative experiences, and complements the volume’s focus on forms of historical consciousness enacted in the museum. This concept acknowledges that engagement can range from the banal to the neutral, or from the actively disengaged to moderate or deep engagement, and that each register of engagement can produce, actively or passively, either politically conservative or progressive responses in the visitor. 3 The work I am engaged in has involved, at time of writing, interviewing over 3,000 visitors to a number of different genres of museums/heritage sites in England, Australia and the United States, and has illustrated not only that different genres of museums engender different registers of engagement, but that different visitors engage with the same exhibition differently. These may be prosaic observations, but exploring the different ways people engage with museums, and the different skills they bring to bear on the engagement, has revealed a complex array of visitor responses, while also illustrating the complexity of the museum–visitor relationship. Although the study did not take place in Canadian museums, the questions underpinning this research connect with visitor-based inquiries led by Canadian scholars, including some contributors to this book. Without homogenizing museums and visitors in England, Australia, United States and Canada, we