My research addresses political problems in curatorial practices that engage with notions of ecology and issues relating to environmental concerns. Taking as case studies the RSA/ACE Arts and Ecology project from 2005-2010; Cape Farewell, and exhibition Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009, I argue that these curatorial forms dissipate and reify the political acuity of artistic content, curatorial context and the constituent, non-art issues. In holding on to an idea of the artwork’s autonomy, curating practice addressing issues that exist outside the flows and circuits of the art world is precluded from properly addressing the wider issues with which it seeks to connect. I call this situation the eco-critical curating paradigm. The problem is addressed in two stages: firstly through a detailed excavation of the term ecology, and secondly through a reformatting of the curatorial. Firstly, I argue that the term ecology has reached its limits as an intellectual force. In response, I propose a move to the ‘ecological’, embodied in four theoretical tools that are both questions and propositions, that initiate inquiries into the socio-politics of located forms and processes of organising, making and doing. Secondly I conduct a critique of the eco-critical curating paradigm. This results in a reformatting of the curatorial that exits the frameworks of art, a format I call the ecological-curatorial. What changes for curating is that form, organisation and production are equally situated alongside content, coalescing around a concern, with curatorial activities emerging out of the intersections of the circumstances, interests, aims and inquiries of the collective engaged in the inquiry. Art might align with these or come into their orbit, but this happens according to the terms of each specific format of the ecological-curatorial. Art therefore does not claim any privileged space within an assemblage of the ecological-curatorial, indeed the format of the ecological-curatorial asks us to critically reappraise the relationship between art and social realities.

This thesis examines the complexities, conflicts and ethical dilemmas involved in the study of refugee resettlement, arguing that museums can play a fundamental role in current debates around asylum. The study presents a cross-disciplinary theoretical examination of the work developed in the last two decades by museums in Britain with and about refugees. It explores the tension between the asylum discourses constructed by museums and refugees’ personal narratives of resettlement, contributing to museological debates around human rights and person-centred methodologies in forced migration studies. I analyse the ambiguities surrounding the human rights discourses articulated by museums, drawing from an extensive survey undertaken across the museum sector and a study of the partnerships established with refugee advocacy organisations. One of the main conclusions reached is that museums have either romanticised exiles or pathologised refugees as traumatised subjects, subjugating human rights discourses to a logic of conditional belonging. Building on the analysis of a refugee community engagement project developed by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, I explore the potential of object-centred practices in providing exiles with a symbolic resource to articulate their own experience of resettlement. I argue that this analysis can help museum scholars and practitioners to move beyond notions of locality and cultural specificity in their work with diaspora groups, bringing a fresh perspective to scholarly debates around the affective potential of museum objects and the embodied experiences they can trigger.

This research explores the correlation between exhibitions and networks in the context of the 21st century Pacific. Firstly, exhibitions are envisioned as relational and connective practices that trigger interactions through their making. Secondly, exhibition-­‐products are regarded as the result of these relationships, which bring together a wide range of agents including makers, things, spaces and epistemologies. Applying the Actor-­‐Network-­‐Theory to the field of exhibition studies, this thesis follows the path of six trans-­‐Pacific museum displays. These case studies were developed between 2006 and 2016 by three major institutions of Oceania, located in Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland Museum), Hawai‘i (Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum) and Taiwan (Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts). After a theoretical and methodological introduction, Chapter 2 dwells on the history of the institutions included in this research and pieces together the genealogical grounds for each exhibition case study. Short-­‐term exhibitions and their capacity to open new museum routes are explored in Chapter 3. Long-­‐term displays and the musealisation of temporary pathways are presented in Chapter 4. While reassembling the trajectories of each exhibition in Chapter 3 and 4 and connecting their genealogies, this study examines the existence of parallels, translations and echoes amongst the case studies in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 further emphasises these relationships and equally dwells on the limitations and impacts of connective narratives by analysing the Pacific maps displayed in these trans-­‐Pacific exhibitions. By and large, this research explores the increasing development of a trans-­‐Pacific culture of display in Oceania, which is examined through the lens of exhibitions developed and presented in this region at the dawn of the 21st century.

Although many contemporary museums possess collections of miniature ethnographic models, few scholars have explored how these objects emphasize ideas of intellectual control. This thesis examines the use and interpretation of miniature ethnographic models in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how the interpretation of these objects reinforced British intellectual control over the peoples of India and Burma during this period by focusing on four sets of miniature ethnographic models purchased by Frederick Horniman in the mid-1890s and displayed in the Horniman Free Museum until it closed in January 1898. Building on the theories of miniature objects developed by Susan Stewart and others, scholarship on the development of tourist art, late nineteenth-century museum education theories, and postcolonial theories the thesis examines the biography of these objects between 1894 and 1898. By drawing on archival documents from the museum, articles about Horniman and the museum from this period, and newspaper articles chronicling Horniman’s journal of his travels between 1894 and 1896, this thesis traces the interpretation of these miniature models from their purchase through their display within the museum to the description of these models by visitors to the museum, and in each case shows how these models embodied notions of intellectual control over the peoples of India and Burma. Where previous studies have focused on only one or two of these phases of objects’ lives this thesis demonstrates that all three phases of these models’ lives (collection, display, and visitor interpretations) within the period reveal aspects of colonial control. Consequently, this thesis provides a basis for further work on investigating how late nineteenth-century collectors and museums utilized objects to both construct knowledge and implicitly highlight aspects of colonial control.

The thesis analyses modes of representation in the South African National Gallery (SANG) between 1930 and 2009. Built in 1930, for the larger part of its history SANG was situated in a white state that disenfranchised the black populace. Whiteness, as citizenship, was normalised and glorified in the state’s museums. Analysis of evidence collected from the archive, décor, art collection, exhibitions, attendance of walking tours and semi-structured interviews with staff demonstrates that SANG’s historic practice does not fit neatly within the dominant theoretical understanding of the art museum, namely a sacred space in which power has been obscured through the ‘art for art’s sake’ model. Instead, the thesis finds at SANG invisible symbolic capital resided alongside the more muscular capital of the colony, which derived its strength from an overt relationship with commerce, politics and race. The thesis further finds that SANG developed a close relationship with its white audience through its construction as a ‘homely space’. As a consequence, I argue SANG developed museological conventions that better fit the analogy of the political house than the temple. Taking new museum ethics into consideration, the thesis examines how SANG’s distinctive heritage impacted on its ability to be inclusive. My fieldwork on recent representational practice at SANG reveals strategies congruent with the post-museum, including performative political exhibitions, diversification of the collection and active dialogue with the communities it seeks to serve. At the same time embedded modes of white cultural representation were identified that restricted its capacity to ‘move-on’. The thesis contributes to the field of museum studies by drawing attention to the significance of the individual histories of art institutions in determining their ability to make change. The thesis also contributes to the field of visual sociology by presenting images and ‘map-making’ as an integral feature of the research design.

'The End of The Curator: On Curatorial Acts as Collective Production of Knowledge' explores the convoluted liaison between knowledge production, collectivity and curating, through practices that have been neglected by mainstream curatorial platforms and art history. Bearing in mind the extensive usage of the notion knowledge production, my practice based research is guided by the question what forms of collective knowledge can curatorial practice produce?

This thesis aims at understanding how museums and temporary exhibitions were used for the purposes of nationalist propaganda during the Portuguese Estado Novo (1926-1974). The dissertation is therefore centred in the analysis of several museums, which are presented as significant case studies of the Portuguese museological reality, as well as in the presentation of all temporary exhibitions of the period where clear propagandistic goals were detectable. According to the plan of the research the methodology to be used was mainly that of the historians. Therefore, after the establishment of a core of concepts, which is presented in the first chapters of the thesis, research was conducted by collecting, analysing and interpreting a body of information that resulted from archive material which was grasped from national, museum and private archives. The materials used range from official documentation of the museums to letters and photographs. The latter were particularly useful for the visual reconstitution of parcels of the temporary exhibitions or even of some permanent exhibition rooms of the museums. Complementary, oral testimonies of former directors and workers of some of the museums were used. The legislation of the period was also grasped for collecting all important laws and decrees concerning museums. All through the research, the establishment of documental evidence to ground any conclusion to be reached was a permanent concern. Hence the case studies and the temporary exhibitions were first presented in order to enable the reader to picture each museum as a case. The final chapter moves into a deeper level of interpretation, by trying to read the articulation of the dominant ideology of the period with the discourse of museums and of temporary exhibitions, and finally elaborating on the theoretical standpoints of the Portuguese museum practice of the epoch.

Museum collections contain examples of Aboriginal Northwest Coast material culture that have been categorised as curios, artefacts, tourist art, arts and crafts, or art. This dissertation examines the emergence of Native Northwest Coast Aboriginal objects made for sale as "arts and crafts". The discussion draws on the multidisciplinary field of material culture studies, on the theories of commodification and on the concept of the reinvention of culture. At the end of the nineteenth century the British Arts and Crafts Movement called for a return to the values and practices of an earlier period of hand crafted objects. For the next half-century in North America government agents, missionaries and philanthropic societies encouraged the production of traditional Aboriginal functional objects as a form of arts and crafts. This activity was perceived as a means of economic self-sufficiency, and to promote feelings of self-identity and self-worth among Native producers. At the onset of World War II. various individuals, private organisations, and government departments worked to transform the producer and the marketplace through education and public policy. Change was to be accomplished by establishing new venues, new expectations of behaviour, and a new social relationship between the supplier and the consumer. Today, a growing number of Native studio crafts people create objects of traditional material culture as a means of livelihood, and as participants in the revitalisation of Northwest Coast Aboriginal society. The term arts and crafts, however, has fallen into disuse and disfavour among Western scholars and Indigenous producers who associate the phrase with poor quality and low income. The term of choice today is art and artist. This work suggests that the production of arts and crafts in British Columbia was an important transition stage in the development of the Native art market. The efforts by private individuals, philanthropic societies and government programs during the mid-20th century raised the value of the hand crafted object. The thesis also suggests that the concept inherent in the Arts and Crafts Movement of "doing good when doing craft", is cyclical, reappearing as strategic policy during times of economic and social crisis on the Northwest Coast.

This thesis explored and compared primary school teachers' agendas and museum experiences in English and Taiwanese schools. Its aim was to understand the impacts of schooling contexts on teachers' perceptions, attitudes and experiences of utilising museums to facilitate their teaching in schools. This thesis employed a qualitative case study approach for its strengths in understanding the subject's viewpoints in his/her life context. Six case studies were conducted, three in England and three in Taiwan. Each case study focused on a primary school teacher's experience of conducting a museum visit. Unlike most research which only studies teachers within museums, this thesis adopted an approach which included participating in school life and recording every step when the teacher organised a museum visit, from preparation before the trip to the follow-up work. This strategy helped to thoroughly understand how the teacher's agenda was developed in the school context. It also investigated the whole process of the teacher's museum experience, and the effects of the teacher's agenda on this experience. In addition, this thesis compared the patterns which emerged from the English and Taiwanese case studies. This comparative approach further revealed the subtle, implicit sides of the teachers' ideas and schooling cultures. The findings of this thesis confirmed the hypothesis that the schooling context has a profound impact on teachers in terms of their attitude towards and usage of museums as an educational resource. Teachers, either explicitly or implicitly, do bring a set of values, needs and expectations when they come to museums. These perceptions, in other words, teachers' agendas, are substantially developed in schooling contexts. In terms of the schooling context, the thesis further identified its two main components, namely educational ideologies and structures. Due to different educational beliefs and curriculum requirements, English and Taiwanese teachers display contrast attitudes and approaches when they use similar educational resources - museums. The findings of this thesis implied the importance of the socio-cultural context that visitors bring to the exhibits, and in the case of this thesis, the schooling experience teachers bring to museums. This thesis also suggested that what teachers perceive and expect from the museum may not necessarily fit with the museum's agenda, that is, the message the museum tries to convey and what it expects visitors to do. In this case, teachers' experience in the museum will be more affected by their own rather than the museum's agenda because visitors are entitled to freely use museums in their own ways. This insight has encouraged museums, policy makers and researchers to pay close attention to the aspect of teachers' agendas, and to use a more holistic perspective to examine visitors' museum experiences which should not be limited to the museum setting, but should also extend to their life contexts in which their agendas are developed.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore in depth the historical development of university archaeology museums in Jordan from 1962 to the present day. The development of concepts and perspectives is revealed through an exploration of the operation and deployment of institutional mission, staffing, exhibitions, collection development, architecture and spatial arrangement, outreach and funding. In order to achieve a high resolution study, two case studies were selected: the Archaeology Museum at the University of Jordan/Amman (established 1962), which is the earliest example of this kind of museum in the country, and the Museum of Jordanian Heritage at Yarmouk University/Irbid (established 1984), which is considered the most successful of these museums. These two museums represent different stages in the establishment of museum culture in Jordan. A core method adopted in this research is that of oral history, but it also involves examination of the documentary record and the physical attributes of the museums themselves. This study reveals radically different conceptions of the museum in Jordan in the latter half of the twentieth century. The museum at the University of Jordan embodied the values of the 1960s, which constrained its ambitions and limited its success, while that at Yarmouk University used this earlier model as the antithesis of its vision, shaping a thoroughly modern and outward-looking institution. It did this, in part, by drawing in staff from the older museum. The Yarmouk University Museum, in a country still coming to terms with the museum concept, made itself a modern centre of local and international networks. Indeed, it took on some of the characteristics of a national museum. The factors that made this transformation in museum thinking possible reflect local conditions in Jordan, where the influence of the Royal Family is significant. However, they also reveal the overriding significance of key visionaries and how the country moved from overt Western influence to develop museums which are quintessentially Jordanian.