This study analyzes objects of Chinese porcelain found at Kina slott located on Drottningholm just outside Stockholm from a material culture (Material Culture Studies MCS) perspective. The aim is to examine how the materiality of porcelain can generate knowledge within MCS and to shed light on how it influenced the image of the Far East in Sweden during the mid-1700s. The study also wants to open up ways for further analyses of Chinese porcelain at the royal palaces in Sweden. Theory is drawn from various interdisciplinary fields of research and activates the concepts of transculturalism and agency to problematize how the porcelain objects was displayed at the castle and how they interact with the environment. The analyses also raise questions about the objects' age and stylistic development. The gaze of the Art historian and the knowledge of connoisseurship are discussed in a reflective section. The result of the study places the material culture and agency of porcelain as an actor with an important impact on the imagination of the utopian Far East in the 1700s but also as a transformer for cultural exchange between East and West. The objects are believed to have been of great importance as authentic props from a distant world and the discussion also takes into consideration the porcelain objects political influence as a status object and commodity.

In this essay, I examine the role of material culture in Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping (1980) to understand how the prominent presence of material culture introduces complex questions about the relationships among objects, reality, and the self. By recognizing objects' fluidity of meaning, Housekeeping offers its characters a way to see their individuality and conceptions of reality in a similar state of flux. Significantly, it is in the act of recognizing that the socially accepted uses of objects are not necessarily "natural" parts of existence, and, like elements of the natural world, the meanings and uses of these items are susceptible to change and decay that an individual is able to recognize that the self is similarly fluid and moldable, which creates room for both imagination and for the possibility of change.

This thesis examines the history of New England’s dugout canoes – a history that can be traced from 8500 BCE to the twenty-first century. The historical record and archaeological evidence surrounding dugout canoes suggests that the use of dugout canoes changed significantly over time, and that their form varied considerably in different regions of New England. While historians have claimed that these varied forms represent European and colonial influences, I argue that the Eurcolonial influence on dugouts was much more visible in the way the canoes were used than in the shape the vessels took. In addition to analyzing the canoes, this study analyzes the ways in which dugout canoes have been exhibited and interpreted in museums and offer suggestions as to best practices in the interpretation of mishoonash as artifacts of contested cultural attribution.

This research attempts to describe the material culture of the Gaelic labouring classes living in western Ulster in the Late Medieval period. The research combines ethnohistorical contextual and technical scientific analysis of ‘chance’ finds discovered in the region’s bogs. Technical analysis dates fifteen museum objects, characterises the materials from which they were made, and explores their cultural significance. Absolute dating indicates that one third of the 15 objects analysed relate to the Gaelic lordships of late medieval western Ulster, with the remainder reflecting aspects of Iron Age and Post-Medieval material culture and related cultural pracrices. Contextual analysis of the later medieval objects and their find locations provides new insights into Gaelic Irish culture and landscape interactions in this period and place. In addition, the research explores the trajectory of indigenous materiality in western Ulster beyond the Late Medieval period. To this end, the thesis examines the relationship between Late Medieval indigenous materiality, and the folk material culture that emerges in western Ulster in the Modern period. / Heritage Consortium, Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK)

My thesis investigates an interdisciplinary narrative of the transatlantic migration of Surrealism to Mexico during the 1940s. I focus on the ways exiled European Surrealists approached notions of Mexican material culture in a hybrid society where local traditions coexisted with a global modernity. Looking to popular and print culture outlets, I concentrate on how Mexican material culture was perceived, promoted, and marketed through a Surrealist lens. Specifically, I consider the collaboration of the German pharmaceutical company Casa Bayer, S.A. and exiled Spanish-born Surrealist Remedios Varo, who produced a series of medical advertisements during her first decade in Mexico City from 1943 to 1949. Through an examination of Varo’s work, my thesis explores the changing boundaries of fine and commercial art that resulted from the efforts of artists who participated in modern mass culture and consumerism. I investigate the significance of her Surrealist advertisements for Casa Bayer as a material culture bound on one side with fine art and the other side with the development of Mexican advertising. This case study supports my argument that Surrealism, as a transnational aesthetic, was one alternative way of demonstrating the new cultural meanings of advertising in an ambiguous, modern Mexican society. Examining Varo’s illustrations in light of the movement of western Europeans to Mexico and the country’s commitment to modern progress explains why the artist negotiated her past avant-garde sensibilities with her Mexican present. / Art History

This thesis sits at the relationship between an architecture, and the landscape that produces and is produced by that architecture, recognising that the way we build is often profoundly damaging to the land and its inhabitants, not only at the site of construction but across a vast network of extraction, transportation and processing. We need a new material culture that rethinks of the built environment as an extension of the wider ecosystem and social context, able to be maintained in good health through a symbiotic, seasonal and regenerative cycle of matter and energy.  The project uses an architectural proposal for collective living in the countryside, to explore how rural areas - responsible for the majority of our resource production - could set a precedent for new patterns of resource consumption and practice a Convivial* Construction.  *where conviviality is the building of long lasting, engaging and open ended relationships with non-humans and ecologies (Buscher & Fletcher, 2021)

This thesis draws on the theory of new materialism to posit an alternative approach to cultural heritage digitization. Modifying the method of critical digitization and synthesizing it with the method of thick description for the study of damaged cultural heritage, this thesis proposes the method weird digitization which seeks to challenge traditional selection criteria for cultural heritage digitization as well as challenging practices of mass digitization. Seeking to identify the cultural heritage objects that may be overlooked using traditional selection criteria as well as ones that may pose challenges to digitization, this approach seeks to highlight the value of damaged or otherwise “weird” cultural heritage while exploring how the digitization of these materials may practically be undertaken. This approach is practically assessed through the exploratory digitization and analysis of selected damaged photographs in the IKFF (Internationella Kvinnoförbundet för Fred och Frihet) collection housed within the KvinnSam (the Swedish National Resource Library for Gender Studies) archive at the Gothenburg University Library. The discussion explores the pragmatic, affective, and artistic benefits of such an approach to cultural heritage digitization.

Examination concerning the possibility of finding prehistoric children as considerable actors through the medium of neolithic clay figurines which were discovered in the archaeological remains regarding a pitted-ware settlement excavated in Tråsättra, Stockholm parish in the year 2016. The main aim for this study is to pay attention to a group of individuals most often overlooked in archaeological research as a whole, by searching to find new angles of incidence in a material previously interpreted from a ritual perspective.

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