This research examines the pre-purchase behaviour of families with children in the museum sector of the leisure market. It focuses on two related research questions. First, how do families with children make decisions to visit museums and second, what role do children play in such decisions? Previous quantitative evidence has found that family leisure and holiday choices tend to be joint decisions and that children exert a significant influence. Museums are an important subset of leisure choice and here studies have uncovered multiple reasons why families visit museums including child-related ones. However few studies have examined non-Western families and investigated the process involved in making such decisions with the focus to study a family including children as a whole unit.

In post/colonial times the roles and purposes of ethnographic museums have been challenged, prompting some institutions to rethink their practices. Recently, criticism has focused on the struggle of ethnographic museums based in post/colonial, multicultural European countries to adjust to the socio-political and cultural changes brought to societies through globalisation and international migration. This thesis explores recent efforts of a few institutions to respond to these changes by experimenting with new exhibitionary praxes. While drawing on insights from several disciplines (primarily postcolonial studies, political theory, cultural studies, and museum studies), this study examines the application of a thematic approach to semi-permanent exhibitions, an exhibitionary praxis focusing on cross-cultural themes. By analysing data from research at two case studies, the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and the Museum of World Culture (Gothenburg, Sweden), this thesis investigates to what extent and how the application of a thematic strategy enables ethnographic museums to move beyond their endemic tendency to construct cultural ‘others’ and their complicity with neo-colonial discourses. The thesis locates the two museums within their historical and socio-political contexts, and explores their ideological positions regarding cultural diversity which have legitimated the application of a thematic strategy. Analysis of selected exhibitions at these institutions suggests that a thematic approach, although posing new and as yet unresolved challenges, nevertheless holds considerable potential to challenge prevailing understandings of cultural diversity and to express postnational, fluid ideas of identities and belonging. Importantly, the investigation into exhibitionary processes has highlighted alterations in the ‘structures of production’ and revealed negotiations across expertise and power relationships. The thesis argues that attempts to introduce new exhibitionary praxes should be accompanied by efforts to alter museums’ internal structures. Eventually, the broader implications of this study question established museological practices and indicate new perspectives for ethnographic museums in our contemporary, rapidly changing, plural Europe.

This thesis considers how the stories preserved in Greek and Roman texts have been used in British museums from the early nineteenth century to the present. It explores the tendency to prioritise textual over visual information which is easy to overlook when dealing with object-based institutions. It demonstrates the pervasive effect that ancient texts and the narratives they convey have had on the way museums think about individual objects, wider history and their own role as public institutions. A series of case studies offer snapshots of the relationship between object and text at different times and places: how ancient texts were used to articulate a political and public role for the Elgin marbles; how public and academic interest in myth inspired innovative museum interpretation in the work of Charles Newton, Jane Harrison, Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans; how collecting at the Fitzwilliam museum demonstrates the difficulties of escaping ancient narratives, even for those committed to object-based approaches; and how an exhibition of Greek Art in World War Two used ancient images and texts alongside each other in ways that idealised Greek art and freedom, while also revealing unease about the relationship between image and text in ancient sources. By looking at these through broader intellectual and social themes it develops a history with continuity as well as contrasts. Several of the case studies visit completely new ground for the history of museums, but even the most familiar moments in collecting history can be understood in new ways through an awareness of how deeply our understanding of ancient objects has been shaped by ancient narratives. I build on contemporary interest in the active role of museums in constituting our understanding of the past by treating the museum as a site of textual reception and an active participant in a tradition.

China’s worldwide cultural promotion has attracted considerable attention in the past decade. Art exhibitions sent out by the Chinese government, as an important part of such initiatives, have been ever more visible in Western museums. How and why the Chinese government uses such exhibitions, however, has rarely been explored. This study examines how such exhibitions have contributed to China’s cultural diplomacy, through shaping the image of China in the British media. It demonstrates how China’s loan exhibitions contribute to an advanced and civilised, democratic and humanist (with Chinese characteristics), innovative and creative, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, open, collaborative and peaceful image of China, and how such image is consistent with China’s cultural diplomacy in the new century. This study examines the factors which have an impact on the media interpretation of such exhibitions, namely the image of China in the media. It explores the involvement of the Chinese government and the influence of museum professionals on both sides (China and the UK) in producing and delivering these exhibitions, and the relationships between them. It demonstrates that the Chinese government plays a vital role in delivering loan exhibitions, but the role is more bureaucratic and facilitating, rather than didactic or propagandistic. The Chinese government is aware of the value of loan exhibitions for cultural diplomacy, but still allows the museums involved enough freedom in shaping the exhibitions. This study also considers the operation of China’s current system of managing loan exhibitions, and their implications for China’s cultural diplomacy and Chinese museums. It concludes that the Chinese government should reform the current system to encourage Chinese museums on all levels to actively engage in international collaboration, without intervening in their professional independence.

This research seeks to examine issues surrounding digital literacy discourse and its place within the museum. Using the design of digital interactives as an example, it asks what assumptions museums have made about child digital literacy, and how these assumptions have changed over the last fifteen years. The study proposes a new application of digital literacy theory that can usefully differentiate between what it categorises as realistic and optimistic perceptions of child digital literacy, and then uses this theory to understand how museums view their child visitors and how they design for them digitally. The research adopts a historical approach in its methodology to look at the design processes and digital interactives over the last fifteen years, in three museums of digital interactive design. The thesis explores what it characterises as the ‘four-step’ design process (from user-centred design theory) to help it uncover where assumptions are made and what effect this has had on the resulting interactives. The intention has been to make a case that when designing in-gallery digital interactives for children, the museums tend to adhere more to an optimistic discourse of digital literacy than one that might be seen as realistic, and that furthermore, this is a tendency that has persisted over the course of many years of design in three English museums. The significance of the thesis rests in the appropriation of digital literacy theory to form a greater understanding of museums’ perception of their young visitors, by uncovering the influences on staff in their digital interactive design considerations.

This thesis examines the concepts and visual strategies employed within the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century curiosity cabinet – here defined as privately-owned European collections of extraordinary objects – to represent the world. This research also examines how these concepts and strategies are paralleled in contemporary art practice from 1990 to the present in Europe and the USA. As such, it challenges traditional museological interpretations of the cabinet as a mere proto-museum, as well as the notion that the cabinet is obsolete as a form of cultural practice. This thesis primarily focuses upon Northern European collecting practice from c. 1540 - c. 1660, and draws upon artworks, objects and collections as illustrative examples. The thesis also offers a new translation of parts of a seminal text in the history of early collections: Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones Vel Tituli Theatri Amplissimi (1565), included in the Appendix. During the last two decades, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in the cabinet, yet perspectives on early collections remain limited – often to a single interpretive lens. Furthermore, scholarship on the nature of the cabinet’s connections with and relevance to contemporary cultural practice is still in its infancy. This thesis contends that the cabinet is best understood as a complex set of practices, related to but distinct from those of contemporary museums, and draws upon the Derridean concept of the spectre in order to demonstrate how the cabinet’s practices are echoed within contemporary art practice at both a visual and conceptual level. Ultimately, this thesis contributes a new historiography, theoretical perspective and methodological approach to the early modern cabinet, one which sets it in an appropriate historical context, but also considers the nature of its significance in the contemporary era.

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My thesis introduces new kinds of understandings of artistic practice taking place in laboratories and engaging with the design, production and critique of technological artefacts. The recent spread of artworks based on physical computing widened and enhanced the role of prototyping in the making of new media art. Indeed prototyping can be now considered as a medium in its own right. My point of departure was an investigation of artists working in academic labs, which led me to question the relationship between research and aesthetic production. My initial argument was that the research process is having a specific impact on art practice, with artefacts understood at least by their makers as incomplete and expecting further manipulation. These artworks are open to transformation and collaborative intervention and refuse any form of material or conceptual black-boxing. The notion of artistic prototypes emerges to enrich the vocabulary to comprehend, evaluate and curate the outcomes of these practices. By analysing a range of artworks that could be conceptualised as prototypical, I soon realised that artistic prototypes are often created for activist purposes too, as a way to critique current behaviours and attitudes and to demonstrate that alternative ones are possible. A major contribution of the thesis is a theoretical framework that outlines the behaviour of artistic prototypes. Openness and fictionality are introduced as key features and it is explained how they support both activism and research. The thesis also provides a contingent aesthetics of prototyping addressing both practitioners’ choices and public reception. A further contribution comprises a number of curatorial projects that develop or respond to the framework. The latter can have an impact on creative practitioners, and on curators and heritage professionals, to the point of deeply affecting established principles of conservation and interpretation.

Initiated from discussions of key curators and exhibitions at the end of the Cultural Revolution, this thesis explores cultural translation through networked curatorial practices in the Chinese context since 1980. In response to increasing local (Chinese) to global (international) exchange, termed as ‘glocal’, I examine different curatorial practices and strategies used to translate exhibitions of avant-garde and contemporary Chinese art towards the development and definition of the role of the transcultural curator. A framework for translation is developed from Homi K. Bhabha’s three-tiered, postcolonial methodology of ‘Third Space’ in parallel with Ray Oldenburg’s theory of third place, whilst rooted in the development of social and cultural networks within Fei Xiaotong’s concept of Chineseness. From these perspectives, it is argued that guanxi self-reflexively provides a basis through which networked curatorial practices can be understood. As a non-Chinese curator and researcher, this thesis is crucially informed by a practice-led component to the research methodology. Responding to China’s unique moment of “museumification”, I establish The Temporary to actively and explicitly reflect on my curatorial practice in relation to research findings. This platform functions as a site of “research curating” (based on the construction of networks of practice) and “curating research” (mapping the action archive), to test and evaluate curatorial strategies, whilst revealing a new internal logic of cultural translation in the Chinese context. This nexus of research explored through theory, concept and practice aims to create a unique set of definitions and arguments to define the role of the transcultural curator. In turn, it presents a series of considerations to be implemented when curating exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art in an international context whilst contributing to the ongoing debate in the field.

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