The thesis outlines both the history and the historiography of the fortress and town of Louisbourg during and since the eighteenth-century, and explains the basis for its designation as a Canadian National Historic site in 1928. Emphasis has been placed on the process of research and development after the 1961 decision by the Cabinet of the Government of Canada to reconstruct a significant segment of the original fortress and town as a historical monument, outdoor museum and tourist attraction. Historical and museological research has been conducted with a view to placing the Louisbourg project into the broader context of historic site preservation and commemoration in Canada and then explaining its presentation to the public. Research, reconstruction and interpretation methodologies and their outcomes have been studied within an interdisciplinary perspective and the research philosophy and its applications have been described and analyzed in detail to document the process of research and development. The Louisbourg project has also been critically examined within the framework of policies and objectives set by Parks Canada and in terms of its contribution to the Canadian heritage field in general. With the aid of comparisons to other outdoor museums and historic sites in North America and Europe, the lessons of the Louisbourg reconstruction project as a public history model have been analyzed and highlighted.

Based on fieldwork that has been conducted at three contemporary art museums and galleries (National Art Museum of China, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, and Shengzhi Space) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including both questionnaire surveys (2376 respondents) and interviews (11 interviewees), this thesis elucidates how contemporary art, an internationally sanctioned legitimate art form, configures into the PRC’s national hierarchy of cultural genres. Through the use of a cluster analysis, a multinomial logistic analysis, and a thematic analysis, this current research demonstrates that the flow of the ‘world culture’ between countries does not necessarily contribute to the prevalence of a hegemonic and internationally universal pattern of cultural consumption in diverse cultural contexts. The most obvious finding to emerge from the analyses is that a negotiation has been taking place between cultural forces that represent different cultural and aesthetic ideologies at the borders of the PRC’s social and cultural context. One consequence of this negotiation is that the public art museum and galleries visitors have a lower probability of encountering artworks that overtly challenge the established Chinese aesthetic, ethical, and political norms. By making compromises with the political interests of the Communist Party of China (CPC) mentioned above, the avant-garde characteristics of the public museum-based contemporary artworks have become increasingly blurred (for instance, by taking a less aggressive stance towards the established traditional aesthetic principles). One of the drawbacks of this compromise lies in its negative influence on the development of the public museum-based contemporary Chinese art. The evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that the public museum-based contemporary Chinese artworks were less attractive for both art professionals and the ‘lay’ visitors. Thus, the PRC’s cultural policies, which aim to preserve the national characteristics of contemporary Chinese art, ended up running counter to its stated goal.

In this study, I develop a critical practice relevant to museums, drawing from feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. I examine the process through which museums construct, order, represent and interpret history to make meaning: how history comes to be true in the museum text. My focus is this process of production, not history itself. If the text is recognised as a construction, then it is available for deconstruction, to reveal the process of production of the text, the relations of production, the materials used, and their arrangement. In the activity of deconstructing the museum text, I take a feminist perspective. From this perspective, I argue that the process and relations of production are themselves gendered: the identities 'man' and 'woman' are formed and articulated through a range of relationships. The categories of 'man' and 'woman' are set against each other but, at the same time, are bound together and interdependent. 'Woman' becomes the background against which 'man' acts: 'his' existence and ascendance depend on 'her' presence and subordination. Together, they provide a thread for museums in the histories and narratives which they make. I examine the development of museums in England, and especially the development of history collections and museums in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, I draw attention to those elements which have contributed most strongly to the articulation of a gendered history in museums. Moving from a general overview to specific case studies, I examine the articulation of history in three museums, whose identities and themes are related to production and consumption, work and leisure. These are chosen to represent the dominant forms through which museums articulate history, and at the same time as important sites for the construction and articulation of gendered narratives and histories. Finally, I look beyond the materials gathered in the case studies, and the conclusions drawn from them, focus on practices and projects which are broadly relevant to the thesis and which, implicitly or explicitly, challenge the conventions of museum work. In these examples, I have looked beyond Britain and beyond history museums, to open up wider possibilities for change.

In its various manifestations, 'art' could be described as a product of 'nature', on which it often reflects, alongside being a product of 'culture'. In recent and past scholarship 'nature' and 'culture' are often treated as opposed categories. Museums in particular have a role in the creation and maintenance ' of a nature/culture configuration. Representing the world in different ways, they have established boundaries between them in the very act of focusing attention on each and increasing understanding in both domains. Drawing on different museological traditions and responding to contemporary issues, the project of creating The Goulandris Museum has brought 'nature' and 'culture' together in its program, exploiting antiquities and other evocations of the ancient world to explain the natural world, especially in its latest schemes. This thesis· examines !he background to such practices, the ideas it embodies and the challenges it sets itself. However, it is more than a study of the history of one particular museum created in the second half of the twentieth century; this thesis also considers the history of other European museums, whose practices and development over time have contributed to the distinctive schema realised in Athens in recent decades. Chapter I introduces the Goulandris Museum and discusses the different ways in which museums have chosen to represent nature. Touching on the means by which they generate knowledge and awareness of the natural world, it discusses how the representation of nature in itself also reflects mankind's plasmatic relationship with the natural world. Chapter II looks back to 'cabinets of curiosity' and the founding and development of three influential institutions to reflect on the tradition of natural history museums in Europe. Chapter III continues with a conceptual and historical reading of London's Natural History Museum, an institution that greatly contributed to the rationale and public presentation of the Goulandris Museum, setting up its first displays. The detail of this particular institutional relationship is examined in Chapter IV, an analysis based on original archival research conducted at the Natural History Museum. . Chapter V examines the displays and practices of the Goulandris Museum prior to the emergence of its research and education centre ('Gaia Centre'), which we explore separately in Chapter VI in conjunction with the New Acropolis Museum, an institution that was designed by the same.architect, Michalis Photiadis. Interviews conducted with him and with the Director and several staff of the Goulandris Museum inform our analysis. That with Mrs. Goulandris is referenced throughout the thesis. The literature review is also · distributed through the thesis at the points where it is relevant and especially in Chapter V which discusses the literature on the history and conception of natural history museums as points of access to the 'real' world of nature. . This thesis is set in a conceptual but also in a historical conte:r:t, as indeed were the ambitions of the founders of the Goulandris Museum. It was the first natural history museum in Greece, and the Qoulandrises sought to situate their new project within both European traditions of natural history museums ' and the traditions of archaeological and classical collections, which had until then dominated the Greek understanding of the purposes of museums. Drawing on these sources, the Goulandris Museum has arrived at its latest scheme which deploys ideas of nature and of culture to shape a very particular identity within Greece ' and to engage and infOlID its visitors.

Timescapes: The production of temporality in museums and literature seeks to partially resolve a significant gap in the literature concerning museums and time. Certain temporal qualities of museums, such as their roles as sites of memory and history, have indeed been explored, and their temporal oddities have been obliquely expressed by thinkers including Foucault. However, direct investigation of the temporal ontology of the museum is seriously lacking; the explorations above focus on the relationship between museums and the past, and certain Foucauldian descriptions of the temporality of museums have been taken on without being subjected to in depth, critical analysis. In order to counter this lack, this thesis aims to directly investigate temporal production by developing and deploying a new critical framework based on tools taken from the creation and analysis of literary works and concepts from academic literary theory, in a physical setting and written analysis. It asks how temporality is manipulated within museums and how that temporality, in turn, affects certain ontological characteristics of the constituents and interlocutors of those museums. As a result, it shows museum temporality to be manipulated and manipulative, paradoxically porous and bounded, and inherently relational, stemming from everything which constitutes a museum. Temporal investigation also reveals questions regarding the ontological and representational natures of museums; this thesis indicates the ways in which they represent others, how they approach, display and build relationships between themselves and their visitors, and something of their own ontological self-awareness. It suggests that cross fertilization between museum and literary studies could prove productive for both the analytical investigation and practical creation of museum spaces. Timescapes seeks to be a thesis powerfully conceptual, one able to highlight the philosophical and ethical dimensions of museums as media, and yet also be demonstrably, productively, of use in the physical, practical world.

Just as museums tell stories about political community, so too do constitutions. Indeed, both function as sites from which imaginations of political community are launched. While the practice of curating is commonly associated with the practice of assembling and organising museums' collections, in this thesis I focus on the practice of curating community. Specifically, both the museum and the constitution set the production of community as their task. In so doing, they participate in the denial of what Jean-Lue Nancy terms 'being-in-common' (Nancy 1991a). Building on existing museological theory, I argue that museums encourage compulsive identity formation by inviting visitors to identify with a prescribed set of political constituencies that they have on offer (Maleuvre 1999: Preziosi 2003). My research adds to this literature by focusing on adult interactive educational programming at three museums - the British Museum in London (UK), Constitution Hill in Johannesburg (South Africa), and the District Six Museum in Cape Town (South Africa). Moreover, while the term 'curating' is most commonly associated with museums and art galleries, it is also relevant to constitutionalism. Indeed, constitutions produce an idea of community - 'the people' - that they represent (Loughlin and Walker 2007). Like the curatorial practices of the museum, these conceptions of community rely on neat and stable categories that attempt to gloss over the messiness of the world. However, museums are also not like constitutions. Although both the museum and the constitution are charged with the task of delimiting community, the constitution, if it is to retain its juridical function, cannot escape the necessity of maintaining these boundaries. In contrast, the museum is not tied to this task. This combination of similarities and differences between the museum and the constitution make them productive sites to be brought together. In fact, it is as a result of these similarities and differences that the museum, when paired with the constitution, can serve as a crucial resource in the production of alternative imaginations of political community. I use this pairing of the museum and the constitution to articulate a theory of counter-monumental constitutionalism that is comprised of two components. The first element of a counter-monumental constitutionalism is that it does not exalt the constitution as the central tool in the production of political community. The museum plays a crucial role in this aspect because it demonstrates that the constitution is not the only place from which imaginations of political community are launched. Considering the museum as a constitution works against the inclination to fetishise the constitutional arrangement as the primary instrument in the production of political community. The second component of a counter-monumental constitutionalism is the necessary interruption of community. The museum is also key in this regard as it, unlike the constitution, has the capacity to facilitate this interruption. I develop this possibility by drawing on research from the District Six Museum. A counter-monumental constitutionalism, in its combination of the constitution with the museum, offers critical insights for the production of post-colonial and post-apartheid theories of law. As such, this thesis makes a unique and interdisciplinary contribution to the fie ld of constitutional theory, post-colonial legal theory, critical legal studies, and critical museum studies.

No description available.

The place and presence of everyday and unworn dress in museums has been largely overlooked in museological and historical accounts of museums and collections. Instead, the focus has been upon the study of elite, spectacular and worn clothing. Similarly, little academic attention has been paid to small-scale, local government operated social history museums, with the bulk of research being conducted into elite national and metropolitan museums or the spectacle of living history museums. This thesis addresses these omissions through a biographical investigation into a single collection of everyday and unworn clothing held by a small and local social history museum: Walsall Museum’s Hodson Shop Collection. Discovered in 1983, the collection consists of around 5,000 items of mass produced unsold shop stock, mainly women’s clothing, from between 1920 and the 1960s. It comprises of the stock of the Hodson General and Fancy Drapers, a small clothing shop located in the lock-making town of Willenhall, West Midlands. Sisters, Edith and Flora Hodson operated the shop between 1920 and around 1971 in the front room of their family home. This thesis provides both a detailed biographical account of the Hodson Shop Collection and a timely account of Walsall Museum’s struggle for survival in an age of increasing austerity. It focuses upon the passage of a large quantity of everyday shop stock items from the world of retail to the museum. Firstly, it demonstrates how the collection has been subject to a range of complex and interconnected external and organisational influences, through an account of its journey to Walsall Museum and its life within the museum, 1983-2016. A number of binary oppositions and hierarchies are explored to show how shifting ideas of value have influenced the survival and visibility of the collection and museum. Secondly, it shows how the statuses of everyday and mass produced items are altered by accession to a museum, challenging the assumption that biographical approaches are most suitable for dealing with ‘spectacular’ aspects of material culture. The story of the Hodson Shop Collection challenges the perception of the museum as a safe and static environment.

This thesis has two aims equally significant: firstly to explore the potential of an instructional approach for developing museum-school partnerships that would empower the multiliteracies experiences of diverse students; second to reveal the fine details of the performances deriving from these experiences. The focus is on the experiences of 4 schoolteachers, 2 museum educators and 36 primary students aged 10-12 years old in the island of Cyprus. The conceptual backdrop draws from the field of New Literacy Studies, the proposed Museum Multiliteracies Practice (MMP) framework derived from the multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group, the Learning by Design Model adapted from Cope and Kalantzis and Schwartz’s museum based pedagogy. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was utilised to undertake the research using both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods and analysis. The research unfolded in three phases: the preliminary stage, the prototyping stage and the assessment stage. The thesis presents the design, enactment and evaluation of the Living Museum Partnership (LMP), a programme unfolded in 13 weeks for the construction of a student-generated virtual museum to support environmental education curriculum. The study contributes to an underexplored area of theory, research and practice towards fulfilling the vision of designing, implementing and evaluating museum-school partnerships for the 21st-century. Also, the research contributes to a growing field of study on theory-based museum learning practice that draws on inclusive pedagogies, in particular for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Finally, the research contributes to developing multimodal tools for empirical research. Findings from classroom observations as a participant observer and action researcher as the museum educator implementing the programme, semi-structured and focus group interviews, and questionnaires indicated that the LMP unfolded in an effective manner. Students’ repertoires of literacy were enhanced as they engaged in the learning process as active designers and multimodal learners.

This thesis examines how curatorial approaches to the display and interpretation of artworks and cultural objects from the African continent, as well as works by diasporan artists of African descent, have changed over time in Western museums and galleries – focusing on histories and geographies of acquisition, collection development, exhibition assemblage, narrative interpretation and other curatorial practices. With particular reference to the culture sectors in Britain and France it investigates how and why exhibits with African provenance have been ‘othered’ in both ethnographic and fine art contexts, drawing on fieldwork undertaken at four case study institutions: the British Museum, Tate, the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Through the application of qualitative research methods – including walk-through reviews of permanent holdings on display, archive-based surveys of past exhibitions, visual analysis of selected exhibits, and semi-structured interviews with curators and other creative professionals – questions are addressed in relation to the nature and extent of othering, the impacts of Self/Other binarism, and amelioration strategies to improve museum and gallery experiences for more diverse audiences. As prior scholarship in this field has tended to concentrate on colonial-era constructions of selfhood and otherness, primarily articulated and exhibited via ethnographic collections, this discursive investigation also examines postcolonial manifestations and legacies of othering observed in 21st century, post-modern displays of fine art. The theoretical perspectives of selected black feminist scholars provide the framework for adopting a non-adjunctive position of resistance from which to read ‘against (as well as along) the grain’ of established Western canons of knowledge and prevailing curatorial orthodoxy. By tracing the historical palimpsests and contemporary networks that connect artists, curators, objects and audiences over time and space, the inherent tensions, instabilities paradoxes and limitations of Self/Other binarism are exposed – opening up opportunities to consider alternative, more conceptually nuanced, inclusive and internationally dialogical museum practices in the West informed by the dynamics of transnationalism, diaspora formation and globalisation.