<p> This study examined how adult guests to the California Science Center engage with a specific conservation education topic: sustainable seafood. Sustainable seafood is a common education message delivered in informal science institutions. This study also investigated whether engaging in an activity about sustainable seafood while simultaneously viewing live fish species would have a greater impact on guests than participating in the same activity while viewing a laboratory space. </p><p> The data showed that guests who participated in a hands-on activity about sustainable seafood knew more about conservation-related topics and were more likely to adopt behaviors conducive to sustainable seafood consumption than guests who participated in a different hands-on activity. The data also showed that the settings in which guests participate in this Sustainable Seafood activity do not influence their knowledge or behavior. This indicates that this Sustainable Seafood activity is effective in educating adult guests, regardless of the setting.</p><p>

This thesis examines the use of social media by museums aiming to establish collaborative relationships with the public. Social media platforms have been widely espoused as transformative in allowing diverse, new or previously excluded audiences to enter into egalitarian, participatory relationships with museums. This thesis deconstructs the concepts of participation and collaboration and identifies the various factors that constrain the extent to which social media enables participatory relationships between previously unequal actors. These factors include the historical disciplinary aims and cultural authority of museums, persistent social inequalities, and the motivations of social media followers. It elucidates crucial questions such as, are various publics enabled to participate on an equal level with each other and with museums? Who benefits from collaborative projects in general and which parties benefit from the use of social media in particular? What are the factors that limit the establishment of collaborative practice? And, conversely, what are the factors that define truly collaborative practice? This research examines museums' use of and discourses surrounding social media as well as social media followers' motivations for engaging with museums online. A large body of quantitative and qualitative data gained through in-depth web-based surveys is analysed, primarily using critical discourse analysis, and informed by other critical orientations including media archaeology and the sociology of expertise. The analysis indicates that museums consider social media to be a transformative, democratising technology. However, museums' acceptance of technologically determinist arguments significantly inhibits positive societal change and the extent to which collaborative relationships can be established with various publics. This research contributes significantly to the existing archaeological and museum studies literature by providing a theoretically and empirically informed critical analysis of the prevailing positive discourses surrounding social media and participation. It has important practical implications for museums in arguing that targeted, critically informed and ethically aware projects are necessary to achieve situations resembling 'collaboration'. It provides a significant body of data that will inform the formulation and continuation of collaborative projects in museums. Furthermore, it informs broader archaeological debates on involving various publics in archaeological practice. This thesis also demonstrates the importance and effectiveness of critical discourse analysis and related critical approaches for analysing large bodies of qualitative data.

<p> The aim of this investigation is to analyze the effects of incorporating scent-based elements in ethnographic exhibits. Specifically, it attempts to identify changes in patron response to a visual display, with and without a scent element. Groups of patrons were observed throughout their engagement with the exhibit, and interviewed post-engagement to generate data on information retention, opinion on content and empathetic response in relation to the exhibit. Findings suggest that the inclusion of scent did increase memorization of the limited facts reinforced through the scent element. However, there was no detectable difference between the groups on measures of overall comprehension of the subject matter, nor their empathetic responses toward the exhibited culture. The results of the study are discussed as a measure of the observer&mdash;observed dichotomy, and the argument is made that multisensory representation in the museum can aid in the facilitation of cross-cultural education.</p>

Much of the available literature on the impact of the architecture of museums of modern art has centred upon the 'spectacularity' of such structures and the regeneration effect on sites and/or cities triggered by their presence, often highlighting their agency in promoting mass tourist activity. However, apart from these widely debated facts, more complex circumstances regarding major shifts in the socio-cultural and political arenas may have influenced the identity, conception, design and implementation of these architectural structures within cityscapes and urban fabrics - circumstances which are often overlooked. Considering this complex contextual frameset, this work concentrates on a specific period of time, indicating the substantial renovation cities have been through since the industrialisation-boom of the 1950s, and ponders the relation between these physical and symbolic transformations and the consequences of this 'modernisation' process in the social-cultural panorama. Albeit assumed as a preponderant factor in cities' 'modernising' policies, this research does not aim to map the most significant or to construct a historiography of modern art museums. The objective is to discuss whether this 'modernisation' process is related to the transformations in the scope, form, function and identity of modern art museums in the last 60 years or so, highlighting the implications of the phenomenon that glorifies these architectural structures per se. But to what extent, or in what sense, has the set of socio-cultural transformations seen since the 1950s conceptually/concretely affected the architecture of museums of modern art? How did this particularly elitist building type emerge as such powerful element in both politico-economic and socio-cultural terms, becoming a major agent in transforming cities' identities since the 1990s? The Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (Affonso Eduardo Reidy, 1953-1967); the Centre de Culture et d'Art Georges Pompidou, Paris (Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers Architects, 1970-1977) and the TATE Modern, London (Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, 1994-2000) were selected to illustrate these transformations. In fact, this work discusses these museums' relevance as architectural objects ; analyses whether they have contributed (or not) to set up a new agenda for modern art museums; and investigates if these (conceptual/concrete) transformations have corresponded (or not) to major shifts in paradigms in the arts, in social-cultural trends and in the architectural practice and thinking within the period.

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The National Park Service's (NPS) George Washington Birthplace National Monument has commemorated Washington and his life for over seventy-five years. For much of that time, the NPS worked closely with the memorial's progenitors, the 'ladies' of the Wakefield National Memorial Association (WNMA). Although equally committed to the preservation of Washington's legacy, these two groups clashed over questions of authenticity, historical authority, and proper commemorative strategy. This dissertation explores their relationship for what it reveals about the rise of public history in this country and Federal involvement therein.;We witness at Washington's birthplace a collision between old-order Colonial Revivalists (led for a time by renowned preservationist Louise DuPont Crowninshield) and a new generation of male museum professionals under NPS Director Horace Albright. The WNMA erected a 'replica' Memorial House atop a site marked in 1815 by George Washington Parke Custis. The NPS determined the Memorial House was neither properly located nor an authentic replica. Still, the WNMA defended the building's veracity. "Birthing Washington" argues that the two groups defined authenticity differently and that those definitions reflected not only gendered difference and political motivation, but also new ways of constituting historical knowledge available during the first half of the twentieth century.;What began as a confused argument about authenticity manifested publicly in decisions made about what kind of objects to display at Washington's birthplace and how to display them. The WNMA preferred charming interiors to the NPS's stark historical realism. Both methods created considerable interpretive possibilities and limitations. Buoyed by national trends, historical realism prevailed at Washington's birthplace. But 'living history' only created new interpretive dilemmas by failing to grapple with old questions about authenticity perpetuated by the Memorial House's ongoing presence. I conclude that sites of public memory cannot help but reify the historical currents of their formative moments and, for that reason, the NPS must challenge itself to interpret the history of commemoration at sites like Washington's birthplace.

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The military has a long tradition of distributing honors to its soldiers in a calculated and uneven way, all to reinforce internal hierarchies it finds necessary. For example, officers have nicer uniforms, are shown more respect, and are awarded medals at a higher rate than the soldiers they command. “Normal” soldiers used to be similarly privileged over their auxiliary “colored” counterparts. In the 20th Century a new line of demarcation was created between front-line combatants (infantrymen, artillerymen, and so on) on the one hand, and rear-echelon support soldiers (supply clerks, cooks, and so on), on the other. This new line of demarcation creates a two-tier system of honor, with support soldiers debased in social standing to show greater honor to their combatant brethren. Before the 20th Century, there were hardly any support soldiers to demean, as the logistical needs of the U.S. military were provided for by civilian camp followers. Now uniformed support soldiers constitute roughly seventy percent of the military. The front-line combatant soldier, once the typical soldier, has become a minority within the military, but a prestigious minority. The two-tier system of honor that privileges combatant soldiers over their support counterparts finds enthusiastic support among combatant soldiers, support soldiers, and in the civilian world. It is reasonable to show the most respect to soldiers who have suffered the most, and undeniably combatant soldiers are killed and wounded at the highest rate. Yet the nature of the two-tier system of honor has qualities that suggest that it is based on more than simply logical and just deference. First, support soldiers (the majority of the military) are not so much shamed as invisible: the fact that the new “median” soldier is today not an infantryman, but a cook, clerk, or water purification specialist rarely enters into public discourse. Secondly, while some uniformed service members are denied military honor, certain civilians have begun making unprecedented claims to military honor. By analyzing recent commemorative art about war, including the Washington D.C. memorials, the Quartermaster Museum at Fort Lee, VA (a museum founded to honor support soldiers), and local commemorative projects that aspire to national recognition, I will show that the social narrative of combat, long the dominant storyline of the military, has been fused with the related personal (and more inclusive) narrative of trauma. This new storyline of trauma-combat has discredited competing storylines. Technical competence, contribution to victory, and belief in the system one defends have become irrelevant, and these were the pathways to military honor open to support soldiers as such. The new narrative of trauma-combat also makes it possible for a war widow or a disabled contractor to claim the honor formerly reserved for soldiers. Loss related to war is the ultimate and only sign of a soldier, and who best embodies this loss than a war widow or a civilian contractor paralyzed by war wounds? At the beginning of the 20th Century, military authority asserted direct control over its camp-followers by placing them in uniform, thus creating a body of support soldiers that would eventually outsize the combat component it was designed to support. At the beginning of the 21st century, the periphery of the military continues to be militarized, while within the military itself, the typical soldier ceases in many ways to be a soldier at all.

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