The case concerning demolition of the Japanese General Government Building in Seoul, South Korea, from the Japanese colonialism has been discussed since Korea’s liberation in 1945, but the building had been used for many functions during that time frame. This building was finally demolished during the period 1995 to 1997, despite the national and international protestations. This research analysed newspaper articles to study the conflict between pro-demolition and pro-conservation groups in the newspapers to see how, and why the conflict proceeded. Korean newspaper archives were used to search four newspapers from the time period of 1991 to 1998, using the keyword ‘Japanese General Government Building’. The collected data was analysed with qualitative methodology to understand the conflicts in the newspapers. This analysis revealed three reasons put forward by the pro-conservation, Memorial and Educational Value, Art and Use Value, and Economic Value and, two reasons of pro-demolition, the Memorial Obstacle and Socio-cultural obstacle. Most reasons for both groups were classic arguments relating to other difficult heritage buildings, however, two different reasons are pertinent to this particular case: First, the government did not present any practical reasons to destroy the building. Second, Feng-Shui was presented as one of the main reasons for destroying the building. This socio-cultural element has been a fundamental and strong belief system in Korea.

This study focuses on the difficult Sami heritage which is exhibited within local history museums in northern Sweden. The study incorporates theories from cultural science and sociology but it is written within religious history as a philological and text-oriented discipline where discourses and social constructions of the Sami heritage and worldviews are in focus. The overall aim of this study is to increase the understanding of the difficult Sami heritage. This means that the analysis focuses on perspectives and discourses within local museums and Sami organisations.   The first research question revolves around the significances and meanings of the difficult Sami heritage: What phenomena (artefacts) and dimensions (immaterial culture) of the difficult past in Sapmi are highlighted? The second research question revolves around the power to represent the Sami heritage: How is the difficult Sami heritage represented? The third research question revolves around perspectives within museum practices: What approaches are the museum practice based upon?   This study focuses on four museums in northern Sweden; Ajtte museum, Samgården, Norrbottens museums and Hägnan museum. They are all local history museums which exhibit the past within a specific region from a rather broad or holistic historical perspective. The student visited each museum and observed the exhibitions then. She read texts, analysed artefacts and watched movies. Facts and interpretations were documented with a pen and the most important phenomena authenticated with a camera.   The difficult phenomena and dimensions within the museums were structured in three groups: living conditions, dark artefacts and colonization. The group living condition refers to poor people, risks, cold climate, hard work, illnesses and social classes. Dark artefacts refer to very old graves and drums which have been lost to the external society. Colonization refers to representations of Sápmi, uses of lands and resources, wounds, lack of local participation within decision-making processes, conflicts and women´s rights.   The analysis of representations highlights reflections about the meanings of the difficult and how subjective this is. Many dimensions within the Sami culture which have appeared as difficult from a colonialist perspective may be bright from an insider perspective. The museum practices follow discourses but there are few expressions within the museums which are associated with ethnocentrism. The external society is not presented as something higher, better or more valuable, but it is obvious that the government did hurt the region in the past.   The museums which were included in this study, based practices on a local separatist/patriotic approach since the unique Sami culture was in focus. It was portrayed as something which stays in contrast to the overall society. The Sami culture was associated with positive characteristics such as traditional, peaceful, original and authentic. The peace and international understanding approach was also embedded since exhibitions were based on ideas expressed within The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) about the rights indigenous people have. The study also concludes that these museums rather based the practice on patriotic thinking, than a cosmopolitan. The museums made use of a bottom-up approach into a varying extent.  When the local perceptions were in focus are the following phenomena highlighted: the inner compass (director with wisdom), wounds of colonization, local worldviews and interaction with nature and animals.

The International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience contributes to current debate about the role that heritage institutions can play as agents for social change. In particular, it proposes historic sites as key venues where dialogue about contemporary human rights issues can take place and help contribute to building stronger democracies, connecting past to present. On the one hand, this raises questions about the activation of competing interpretations of the past to create a critical civic culture. On the other hand, the project of the 'Site of Conscience' asks questions about what there is in the nature of visiting historic site museums that might particularly lend itself to creating an active citizenry. Focusing on the latter of these two concerns, the thesis uses theatre and performance as a conceptual framework for understanding the controls and possibilities of a creative and empowering participation for public visitors at three of the Coalition's member sites: the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, USA; The Workhouse, UK; and The Gulag Museum at Perm-36, Russia. Through reading performance into the visiting event, the thesis is able to respond to questions about how visitors negotiate the museum's project to relate past to present with their own interests in visiting the past, not as a matter of competing narratives but of competing modes of encounter. How people experience their visit is foregrounded as a condition of political engagement.The question then asked is how this negotiation of modes of encounter becomes a performance of the Site of Conscience and the effective achievement of the museum's social agency. The thesis focuses on the uncertainties and gaps that emerge out of the intervening presence of a museum interpreting an historic site. In these circumstances, how control over the making of the visiting event is distributed becomes critical to its transformative potential. The thesis therefore asks about how visitor experiences of these uncertainties and differences become a negotiation of authority to represent the past and hence, how the past emerges in the present.