Today, many museums both around the world and in Britain are in the process of renewing, rejuvenating, refurbishing and/or rebranding themselves. These museums are actually doing this in order to be able to respond better to the evolving needs and wants of consumers, which change continuously as a result of the transformations that take place in the consumer culture. The central aim of this thesis is to investigate the paradigm shifts happening in contemporary British museums, which evolve parallel to the evolving British consumer culture. These paradigm shifts actually seem to be a reflection of the paradigm shifts that are happening in 21st century museums all around the world, in general. Museums of today are highly interested in branding and they invest in it to a great extent. This is in part due to the effects of postmodernism on museums. This fondness for branding seems to turn museums into objects of consumption, makes them like other products in the market. Another aim of this thesis is to investigate how contemporary museums are defined as objects of consumption and managed as brands. For this purpose, Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), a British museum situated in Exeter, which has been going through an inclusive refurbishment process for the last four years, has been selected for carrying out an extended case study on. Diverse data collection tools have been used such as participant and non-participant observations were made; in-depth interviews with especially staff members and also some other stakeholders like volunteers and visitors were carried out, photographs were taken; website of the museum was analysed; a lot of field notes were taken and then these data have been analysed. The RAMM example and also the literature review made on world museums in general have shown that the museums of the last century have got into the direction of uniting and co-creating value with their visitors, in their museums. This is a thorough democratization process in the museum. In order for this to take place, museums have taken the interaction and participation levels with their visitors much higher. Detailed accounts on these and other phenomena about new museums can be found in the thesis.

I am researching the experience of foster care drift. This term refers to children who are considered homeless because it is not clear where they are going next. Research shows that the majority of children who have experienced foster care drift lead unstable lives after reaching the age of eighteen. They have high levels of poverty, homelessness, and incarceration, lack the most basic literacy and life skills, do not sustain employment, and lack health care and mental health care. The research is centered in a residential treatment center for girls. I conducted ethnographic research while working with about two dozen girls, aged seven to seventeen, on service-learning projects. The girls designed projects in which they developed a sense of helping someone else. Frequently these projects involved the making and exchange of material objects. Unfortunately, the institutional structure isn’t set up to provide such activities on a regular basis. My analysis focuses on how the girls use objects to gain social status and form bonds with others. I seek to understand the nature of their sense of ownership and belonging in a group, which differ markedly from those valued outside the system. The skills the girls are practicing in the residential treatment center will serve them well in total institutions such as prisons and mental hospitals, but they will have a hard time succeeding in a job or educational setting. / text

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

This thesis examines four different public archaeology projects in South Africa, and poses questions related to how archaeology is defined and mediated by educational centres and museums in South Africa. The museums have a rather traditional way of mediating archaeological knowledge to a broader public, but they do include exhibitions that invite visitors to interpret human history themselves. The educational centres, on the other hand, are considered to be a category below the traditional museum, where the content is developed in collaboration with indigenous people, and the knowledge about former peoples is mediated by the indigenous people themselves, as part of an objective to develop employment opportunities for marginalised community groups. While educational centres have developed out of this collaboration with indigenous communities, mueseums were established during the colonial period of South Africa. The educational centres are a collaboration between  experts and non-experts, and have an inclusive approach. Museums, in contrast, develop their content based on the experts´knowledge, for the visitor and not with the visitor. However, it is evident that visitors are intended to have a dialogue with the exhibition. An inclusive approach is preferble, where experts and non-experts are on the same level, show mutual respect for each other, and are open to learning from each other. A significant issue that public archaeologists face is that each public project is unique. This means that new methods and ideas are needed for each project. Four different projects have been visited and examined, and it was found that all four projects were unique in terms of the issues that they faced and in terms of how the professionals solve those problems in specific ways adapted to each unigue project. On the one hand, the question of what a successful public project is or can be remains, but on the other hand, it is clear that a well-established collaboration and an understanding for each other is needed to develop a successful public work. In South African terms a succssesful public work could be termed "Ubuntu archaeology", where the word "Ubuntu" is interpretes as Desmond Tutu put it in 1994, where both parties experience each other as equal.

The difficulties faced by services in the cultural sector have been immediate and challenging. Public services that are cultural in nature have faced funding cuts, closures and redundancies. Museum services are low in political importance and unable to provide clear evidence of their policy impact. Despite these challenges, there has been limited evidence about the policy process at ground-level. This thesis builds on theoretical and empirical ideas in social and cultural policy to present museum workers’ perspectives within a cultural theory framework. Following Lipsky’s (1980) work on street-level bureaucrats, this thesis presents an analysis of street-level workers’ roles in delivering social and cultural policy. Museum workers’ perspectives are presented through a series of case studies (drawing on qualitative interviews and observations) from three local-authority museum services in England, Scotland and Wales. The findings showed evidence that top-down cultural and social policies have had an influence on workers actions, but service-level workers’ understandings were central to the policy process. Museum workers actively shaped museum policy through ground-level interactions with visitors and groups. Workers experienced policy in the cultural sector as fragmented, vague and difficult to engage with at the ground-level. Workers mainly viewed policy as meaningless rhetoric. Despite this, those working at ground-level often utilised policy rhetoric effectively to gain funding and manipulate activities towards their own needs and interpretations. Policy evaluation was also fragmented and underdeveloped within the services studied. Workers found themselves under pressure to fulfil policy objectives but were unable to show how they did this. Furthermore, there was a perceived distance from managers and local authority structures. This allowed a space for workers to implement and shape policy towards their own professional and personal ideals. Vague policies and a lack of formal mechanisms for evaluation led to high levels of worker discretion at ground-level. Economic policy expectations were resisted by workers, who tended to have more egalitarian views. Museum workers effectively managed policy expectations through a mixture of discretion and policy manipulation. Delivery at the ground-level was seen as effective – despite, not because of, cultural sector policies.

Arts organizations are moving toward a more open space through community outreach programs. This space allows for art-focused dialogue to occur that facilitates interaction between people. This dialogue then opens the door for new relationships to transpire. The move toward dialogical and relational space in arts organizations is based on demographic, economic, and ideological changes in arts fields that reflect a growing opportunity for democratization through the arts. This study utilizes a website and mission statement review, survey responses, and a case study to explore how arts organizations (including museums, arts centers, artists' communities, arts councils, and art and craft schools) are serving community needs by creating a relational and dialogical space within and outside of their walls.

People are fascinated with death and disaster. One simply has to watch traffic slow to a crawl when passing a car accident to understand this. However, this fascination goes beyond the side of a highway and enters the realm of tourism. Today, numerous sites of death and disaster attract millions of visitors from all around the world: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Anne Frank's House, Graceland, Oklahoma City, Gettysburg, Vimy Ridge, the Somme, Arlington National Cemetery. The list grows each year as exhibited by the recent creation of an apartheid museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. Due to the increasing popularity of this tourism product, a small number of academics have begun studying the phenomenon. Leading the field are Lennon and Foley who labeled it Dark Tourism, Seaton who coined the term Thanatourism, and Rojek who developed the concept of Black Spots. However, despite ongoing study, there has been a paucity in understanding what actually motivates individuals to sites of dark tourism. Yet understanding motivation is imperative, particularly given the subject and sensitivity of these sites. Some are slowly decaying, and visitors play a large role in their preservation. Subsequently, without proper management, visitor influxes can further deteriorate sites or induce friction with the locals. Knowledge then, also provides administrators the necessary tools to properly manage the varying stakeholders. Although many feel an interest in death and disaster simply stems from morbidity, the range of factors involved extend from an interest in history and heritage to education to remembrance. To begin this study, a list of possible motivations was compiled. Then, to get a better comprehension of these motivations, visitors to the Holocaust Museum Houston were surveyed as a case study. As a commodified, synthetic site of death and atrocity, the museum fits the definitions of a dark tourism site as established by lead academics. Therefore, by asking visitors to the museum what motivated them to the site, the results will hopefully give some acumen into the wants and needs of certain stakeholders. Finally, this research sought to discover if motivation at the museum could shed light on motivation to other sites of dark tourism.

Šio tyrimo objektas – Lietuvos muziejų erdvėse eksponuojamų koklinių krosnių rekonstrukcijos įvertinimas autentiškumo ir paveldosauginiu aspektu. Pagrindinis darbo tikslas – išanalizuoti ir įvertinti Lietuvos muziejų erdvėse eksponuojamų krosnių rekonstrukcijas. Darbe gilinamasi į atkūrimo autentiškumo problematiką. Vieni iš svarbiausių tikslui pasiekti keliamų uždavinių yra koklinių krosnių rekonstrukcijų reikšmės analizė bei būdingųjų verčių nustatymas. Kadangi koklinių krosnių rekonstrukcijos Vilniaus Žemutinėje pilyje yra ne tik didžiausios savo mastu, bet ir sudėtingiausios, didžiausias dėmesys tyrime skiriamas būtent šiam muziejui. Darbe atliekama mokslinių tyrimų duomenų, koklinių krosnių rekonstrukcinių maketų analizė, nagrinėjami teoriniai bei teisiniai pagrindai, kuriais remiamasi rekonstruojant Vilniaus Žemutinės pilies koklines krosnis, analizuojamos bei vertinamos koklinių krosnių eksponavimo vieta bei galimybės. Vertinimo kriterijais pasirinkus paveldosauginius, meninius, autentiškumo kriterijus, atliekamas koklinių krosnių rekonstrukcijų įvertinimas. Tyrimas reikšmingas tuo, kad atkreips dėmesį į Lietuvoje rekonstruojamas koklines krosnis. Aktualus paliestu autentiškumo ir moksliškumo klausimu. Šis darbas gali būti naudingas paveldo apsaugos specialistams, susiduriantiems su archeologiniu, architektūriniu paveldu, menotyrininkams bei muziejininkams. / The subject of this research is reconstructed tile furnaces exposed in spaces of Lithuanian museums. The aim of this work is to analyze and evaluate those reconstructions using the test of authenticy and main principles of conservation. Talking about reconstruction itself, the main problem of authenticy occurs. One of the main purpose in this work is the analysis of importance of reconstructed tile furnaces and attempt to select the typical values they implicate. As the reconstruction of tile furnaces in Lower castle of Vilnius is of the largest extent and also the most complicate one, the greatest attention in this work is dedicated to this museum. Amongst the main difficulties of reconstruction are: colleting tiles and making reconstructions, localization of original places of tile furnaces, attribution problem dealing with remains of tiles from various furnaces. The methods used in this work are: analysis of scientific information and models of reconstruction of tile furnaces, also the theoretical and juridical aspects are analyzed on which the idea of reconstruction is based. Also in the research is given the evaluation of the place of exhibition and stressed possibilities. To pursue the evaluation, various criteria have been chosen: the reconstructions of tile furnaces are analyzed according to principles of conservation, art and authenticy. This research is important because it spotlights the problem of reconstruction of tile furnaces, and relevant because of its... [to full text]