Commemorative programming for historic anniversaries reveals an interpretive and narrative evolution between public memory and history. The divisiveness of the war and the public’s ambivalence about its meaning allowed for broader interpretive perspectives compared to earlier war commemorations. Research on the evolving narratives considers how public memory informs identity and affects historical interpretations. Recent museum exhibits, historic sites, and films about the Vietnam War bring into focus the changing narrative of the Vietnam War. Case studies for this research are the Washington, D.C. National Archives and Records Administration Remembering Vietnam exhibit, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s plans for an education center, and Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary The Vietnam War. The soldier’s experience narrative still dominates interpretations, but interpretations have expanded to include the Vietnamese and the protest perspective. The passage of time and the conflict’s complexity has opened the way for new perspectives in commemorative programming.

This study is a contribution to the programme of memorializing District Six through the site-specific stories that are shared in research, education, and the co-curated spaces of the District Six Museum. When buildings, streets, street names and place names are erased from a landscape; when cultural, economic, religious, and educational spaces are shut down; then people’s connections to place are disrupted, diverted, reimagined, often lost to future linked generations. These connections, however, continue to live on in people’s memories - individual and collective, sometimes lying dormant waiting to be triggered into wakefulness and visibility. In the case of District Six, these memories have lived on as nostalgia about a recent past with the trauma, often, edited out. Consequently, District Six has frequently been rendered as a stereotype - a friendly, unproblematic, tolerant, kanala place, where grand narrative re-enactments provide a sense of closure for some or evokes a sense of renewed anger about the stories not told and the unfulfilled restitution process. The stories of women factory workers are a case in point, where the closing down of factories and the subsequent loss of livelihoods are remembered in two ways. Firstly, through a lens of nostalgia premised on the idea that the past was a better place when we had jobs and could feed our families. Secondly, this recent past is also remembered with a sense of unresolved anger that people are less important than profit margins and real estate - a mentality that resulted in the export of cheap labour factories overseas and gentrification. This study explores the stories of two women clothing workers from District Six. I mapped out the important clothing factories contained in the stories of the two women I interviewed like, for example, the Ensign Factory that was in a section of District Six now rezoned as part of Woodstock. The site and its surroundings have taken on a new corporate brand but still lives with the spectral traces of the old District Six. I make these and other District Six fragments more visible through the stories of Ruth Rosa Phala-Jeftha and Farahnaaz Gilfelleon, using the District Six Museum’s oral history methodology – one steeped in a critical pedagogy where the storytellers have agency and are invited into a co-curated sense-making and interpretive process. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSocSci / Unrestricted

The study investigates traces and historical origins, socio-economic, political and cultural lives of 'black servants' who worked and lived at the Zwartkoppies Farm and other establishments owned by Sammy Marks through photographs, oral histories and Archives. Furthermore, I interrogate the notion of representation by exploring the house as a colonial object and the site as exclusive and perpetuating divisions in a democratic South Africa. The decision to employ oral histories is so as to give these servants the freedom to represent themselves in a space where their voices have been muted in their presence. The history of labour in Southern Africa serves as my point of departure so as to better frame my research. This study reflects on the effects of colonisation and apartheid characterised by injustices and marginalisation which is to this day still are reflected in the silenced narratives of South Africa's dark history. / Dissertation (MSoSci)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / University of Pretoria Bursary and DITSONG Museums of South Africa Bursary / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSoSci (Heritage and Museum Studies) / Unrestricted

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<p> This dissertation provides an analysis of current multilingual practices among art museums in New York City. This study is located within the current theoretical analysis of 1) museums as sites of cultural production and 2) the politics of language, interpretative material, and technology. This study demonstrates how new roles for museums embracing multilingual exhibitions and technology may signal new ways of learning and inclusion.</p><p> The first part is a theoretical-based approach. The second part consists of a mixed-method research design using qualitative and quantitative methods to create three different surveys: of museum staff, of the general public, and finally my observations of museum facilities and human subjects.</p><p> Multilingual exhibitions are complex and require changes at all levels in a museum's organizational structure. Access to museum resources can provide more specific data about language usage. The survey responses from 175 adults provides statistics on multilingual settings and its complexity. The survey responses from 5 museums reveals the difficulty, and benefits, of dealing with this topic. Visual observations at 36 museums indicate that visitors pay attention to interpretative material, while production cost, space, and qualified linguistic staff are concerns for museums. Technology is a breakthrough in multilingual offerings, for it can help democratize a museum's culture to build stronger cultural community connections.</p>

<p> Museums, and museum professionals, engage in a significant role within society. This dissertation is a qualitative exploratory study of the ways in which museum professionals promote or hinder the social inclusivity of museums through curatorial voice. Through a series of exhibit evaluations and intensive interviews, the researcher investigates the mechanisms used to craft curatorial voice within museums that handle contested subject material. This research seeks to broaden the understanding of curatorial voice, as viewed through the theoretical lenses of gatekeeper theory and co-creation of identity, with the explicit purpose of aiding in the development of professional guidance to help make museums more socially inclusive.</p>

<p> As a community-based art educator, I advocate for an arts-based educational environment that embraces postmodern tenets and encourages individuals to reflect on self and society in relation to the places in which they dwell and learn. This thesis is a dialogue on emplaced community-based art education. Issues of urban education, social justice, and critical pedagogy are considered in relation to participants&rsquo; enactments of place within two distinct community-based educational settings. In order to investigate the connections between a culture of place, place-based education, and the community-based programs of each site, the role of art and artifacts was carefully considered in building a sense of place and placemaking within the comparison of each case study. Data was collected over the course of a year and later analyzed through the lens of narrative analysis-a focus on how people spoke to personal values and social beliefs associated with their enactment of place-based education. </p>