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The Graphic wrote in 1870 'The politics of Brighton are a puzzle. The most intensely aristocratic city in the kingdom, after the capital, is intensely Radical'. This political 'puzzle' is also relevant to the outlooks of the five rich and upwardly mobile Victorians whose collections are the focus of this thesis. Their private and public involvements including their art collections reflected a paradoxical amalgam of both liberal and patricianal views, of radical rhetoric and aristocratic aspiration. This is an analysis of art collecting and culture in Britain's largest seaside resort in the nineteenth century, the local government and civil society of which reflected the growing influence of the urban middle class as much as in the classic industrial revolution cities of the north and midlands. The four collections were assembled by William Coningham (1815-1884), Henry Hill (1813-1882), Henry Willett (1823-1905) and Harriet Trist (1816-1896) and her husband John Hamilton Trist (1812-1891). The main purpose of the thesis is to explore the relationship between the wealth of five aspiring members of the Brighton bourgeoisie and the social and political meanings of their art collections paid for out of fortunes made from sugar, tailoring, beer and wine. Coningham and Willett accumulated mainly old masters including niche collections of early Renaissance paintings. Hill is notable for his contemporary collection of realist and impressionist art including the works of Frank Holl and Edgar Degas. The main part of the Trist collection included Pre-Raphaelite and aestheticist works, particularly the paintings of Arthur Hughes. There is no previous dedicated scholarly work on art collecting in nineteenth century Brighton. More generally the thesis in its emphasis on the 'liberal paternalist' outlook of upper middle class elite collectors and its focus on a town dedicated to pleasure and consumption rather than industry and production, provides an alternative interpretation to middle class art collecting to that offered by Dianne Macleod in Art and the Victorian Middle Class, Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (1996).

This thesis challenges the misrecognition of artist-led initiatives as a merely casual or anticipatory epiphenomenon within the increasingly commercialised and centralised administration of contemporary art that is leading such initiatives towards funder-directed institutionalisation. Using qualitative research methods to analyse a significant archive of original interviews, in conjunction with my own research-led curatorial practice, the thesis poses a challenge to the discourses on cultural value and cultural ecology that form the dominant policy framework. From my analysis of the interviews with artist-led organisations and their directors, I displace these official frameworks by discovering counter-concepts of value and values sustaining artist-led initiatives as a singular and long-term component of cultural activity. I identify the creation of artist-led spaces as a 'locus of desire' for self-organisation. In order to research this question, I have worked with the Grounded Theory Method [GTM] to analyse ten interviews with participants through the process of coding their statements in order to formulate new concepts through which to understand their practice and its challenges. The key concepts I have produced are: Doing, Negotiating, Lacking and Losing, and Feeling. These concepts capture the contemporary realities for artistic practice and the affective labour of artists beyond the circulatory meritocracies of major arts institutions. The concepts have been tested and thickened through analysis of three case studies moving from the centres of a major city and a northern town (Birmingham and Rotherham) to the specificity of one local community situated at the urban margins (Gipton in East Leeds). Finally, I propose artist-led spaces as critical spatial practices that incubate alternative - kinaesthetic - forms of collective knowledge production and community building. The thesis presents a critical analysis of a major and widespread area of cultural production that has been a problematic and contested discursive and historiographic field. By researching and assessing the value and impact of artist-led initiatives in their own accounts and, by using primary qualitative research, I argue for the distinctive yet varied and socio-economically challenged role of sustained artist-led initiatives and their potential relevance elsewhere across the whole portfolio of contemporary artistic activities. Largely situated in urban settings, intersecting with the vagaries and changing terms of urban development and regeneration, my research addresses policy debates within civic initiatives in terms of cities and culture, creative education, and the challenges of creating and sustaining inclusive and egalitarian polities in which artists are able to practice beyond the centralised models that assume a single career path based on marketability and institutionalisation.

Grindelia is among the most taxonomically challenging groups of North American composites. The genus as a whole has an amphitropical distribution, with approximately half of the species native to North America and Mexico and the remainder native to South America. I used DNA sequence data from the nuclear ribosomal ITS and ETS and chloroplast psaI-accD regions to revisit hypotheses on biogeographic history across the genus. Grindelia as a whole is well-supported and is composed of two sister clades, one native to South America and the other native to North America, including Mexico. The South American taxa are much more diverse in habit than the North American taxa. The North American taxa constitute two clades that largely occur on different sides of the Continental Divide. The diverse radiation of Grindelia in the California Floristic Province (CA-FP) appears to be most closely related to species from the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau and evidently descended from drought-adapted ancestors. Although Steyermark's hypotheses about the relationships of North American Grindelia are not all supported, I did recover a clade corresponding to his Pacific radiation and many of the Mexican and Texan species that he hypothesized to be basal in the genus represent early diverging lineages in my trees.Polyploid complexes have long been a source of confusion to taxonomists due to their combination of morphological and ecological variability with a lack of obvious boundaries between putative species. Grindelia (Asteraceae) in the CA-FP provides a prime example of both of these attributes. Both diploid and tetraploid plants occur within the CA-FP, with tetraploids predominating along the coast and diploids in the interior. Although phylogenetic analysis shows that CA-FP Grindelia form a clade, relationships within the clade remain unresolved due to a lack of sequence divergence. Complex ecological and morphological variation within CA-FP Grindelia has been interpreted as being indicative of either extensive or no taxonomic diversity. I have chosen to follow an intermediate approach, recognizing what I consider to be the most morphological and ecologically distinctive ecotypes or clusters of ecotypes as taxa. In addition, I emphasized putative taxa that appear to maintain their morphological distinctiveness when growing sympatrically or peripatrically in the field.Most of the morphological and ecological diversity in CA-FP Grindelia is present in the tetraploids, which appear to be autotetraploids based on cytogenetic data from prior studies. I used data from six nuclear microsatellites to examine 439 individuals from ten populations (nine tetraploid and one diploid) of Grindelia collected in and near the San Francisco Bay Area. I wanted to assess whether any genetic structure was evident across populations or taxa or both. Each of the ten populations was genetically distinct from the others and gene flow among populations appeared to be low. Although the plants grouped more strongly according to population than according to taxon, it was possible to classify > 90% of the individuals according to taxon using discriminant analysis of the microsatellite data.

Before the publication of Luo Xianglin’s An Introduction of Hakka Study in 1933, Hakka 客家, ‘the Guest people’, were seen as a ‘backward’ and a non-Chinese race by both elite Han Chinese and western scholars. Yet in contrast the 20th century saw Hakka become seen as a distinguished minxi (sub-branches within a nation) of the Han Chinese. These shifts in the status of Hakka continue to exert an influence today and allow Hakka to exist almost without a definition. Over the last decade there has been a notable increase in Hakka institutions across the world in sites of Chinese diaspora, including museums and heritage institutions. This study investigates Hakka institutions as agents in the ambiguity of the meaning of ‘Hakka’ in negotiating ethnicity and national identity in contemporary China. My study is framed around fieldwork that I conducted in Hezhou Hakka Ecomuseum in Guangxi Province, the first Hakka ecomuseum in China. In my critical analysis of the interview with the museum director, conversations with the villagers and museum staff and other research derived from my fieldwork, I investigate how Hakka is treated in contemporary China and in which way it serves the purpose of promoting China’s cultural nationalism and enhancing a national unity. My own reflections on visiting the ecomuseum are also under critical investigation. This study is a self-searching process because I am a Hakka as well. With an autoethnographic approach, I attempt to (re)construct my own Hakka identity through encounters in these spaces. Through these approaches, and a wider analysis of China’s heritage discourse and practices, I contest the idea of having an ecomuseum for Hakka in mainland China. The model of the ecomuseum in mainland China is often adopted to preserve ‘minority’ cultures which are on the verge of extinction due to rapid urbanisation and modernisation. Hakka, however, is not generally considered as ‘minority’ or accorded any ethnic status which is discrete from other Han Chinese groups in contemporary mainland China. I argue that Hakka institutions are proliferating largely because the ambiguity in the definition of Hakka allows for the issues of authenticity to be circumnavigated. Hakka heritage can perform a dual function. It can appear to be closely aligned to ancient Chinese philosophy and a Han-ethnocentric worldview to fit into the national narrative. Yet the distinctiveness of Hakka means it can also play a vital role in China’s cultural diplomacy. My investigations on Hakka museums and theme parks in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia help elucidate how these spaces have become new spaces for the Chinese government to make connections with Chinese communities worldwide. This research opens up debates about cultural diversity and its heritage practices in the Chinese context, issues which have arisen precisely because China is currently ‘going out’ as part of a new phase in pursuing the ‘China Dream’.

The importance of friendship has been under-researched in relation to artistic discourse. This lack of research becomes particularly acute when considering ambiguous formations of collective artistic activity. My thesis draws upon friendship as a socio-cultural phenomenon in order to situate the artist-led collective both historically and within the contemporary art continuum. Tracing an historiography of the personal relationships which blurred the boundaries between art and politics, from the re-imagining of the medieval artisanal guild in the nineteenth century to the development of Futurism in the early twentieth century, I argue that the contemporary artist-led collective is haunted by these ‘collectivisms past’ and the spectre of autonomy. Further, the contradictions located within the ideological notions of individualism, which pervade the neo-liberal capitalist hegemony, both deny collective agency and yet accept collective praxis in the guise of enterprise culture. It is this contradictory character that frames my thesis and provides the context for understanding the complex role which friendship plays in the genesis of the contemporary artist-led collective. In order to understand the implications of friendship as a vital component of the artist-led collective, I utilise Relational Dialectics Theory (RDT) developed by Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery, as a conceptual framework. I employ in-depth case studies of the artist-led collective duo The Cool Couple and architecture collective Assemble, in order to explore how friendship informs artist-led collectives throughout their life cycles. I question how and why these social bonds, which constitute relationships and thus shape the collectives, interrelate with a multiplicity of forces in their specific cultural ecology. These interrelations are further explored through a mapping study of artist-led collective activity in Leeds, UK. This study problematises the dualistic perspective of resistance and co-option between artist-led collectives and institutions. I argue that the evolution of the artist-led collective is implicitly interrelated with the institution and thus the binary opposition of resistance and co-option becomes a dialectical knot of ever-changing relationships. Finally, I situate myself in the research through an auto-ethnographic study of the artist-led collective The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe, of which I am a founding member. This case study enables an internal view of the social bonds which formed The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe and provides an insight that would otherwise be impossible from an external perspective.

Institutional knowledge of audiences is often framed around scaled notions of ‘local’, ‘national’, ‘international’, ‘community’ and so on. In analyses, however, the epistemological and ontological status of these terms is rarely questioned. If we are to gain a deeper understanding of knowledge production in the gallery, it is vital that the particular ways that spaces and scales are enacted and evoked by various actors in and around the organisation are explored. This thesis argues that by employing a methodological approach of situated action and relational assemblage it is possible not only to unpick such constructions of ‘local’ and ‘(inter)national’, but also to move beyond counterpositional or hierarchical thinking and practice towards more productive ways of working with and through complexity. This exploration will be grounded in the organisational practices and social relations that form a particular art gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield. Drawing on my autoethnographic experiences as a colleague and a researcher within the organisation, the ambition of this thesis is to explore the dynamic processes of different practices, ideas, materials and affects assembling (dissembling and reassembling) at different moments to create different performances and enactions of The Hepworth Wakefield. Each are perspectives on reality, which can be mobilised at different times and in different ways, sometimes brought to the fore, sometimes pushed to the background. By attending closely to processes and actions in the Gallery at particular moments (situated action), this thesis will trace (re)configurations of The Hepworth Wakefield – as ‘local’, as ‘(inter)national, as ‘community’, as ‘artworld’, and so on – and will explore the productive possibilities of acknowledging and celebrating the multiple realities and complexities of the Gallery, and propose ways of moving forward in these differences, rather than seeking their resolution.

Fairfax House, a mid-eighteenth-century house in York, was restored in the 1980s and is now a museum. The house is examined in this thesis as the focus of a complex process of material change and interpretative development over time. In particular, the thesis explores the significance of the interior decorative plasterwork at the house in its social, cultural, material and aesthetic dimensions. The plasterwork and the house that contains it are material objects that have been subject to change over time, not only in substance but in the way they have been perceived and the meanings they have accrued. The full exploration of this dynamic process requires that they are analysed not only in the context of the eighteenth century, when both were created, but also the twentieth century, when the house was restored. The plasterwork played a central role in that restoration because of the significance it had developed among York’s ‘neo-Georgians’, the influential group of conservation-minded individuals centred on York Civic Trust, who sought to bring the perceived qualities of Georgian civilisation to bear upon aesthetics and civic culture of modern York. The restoration of Fairfax House, which involved not only the reshaping of the plasterwork’s material substance but also of its meaning and interpretation, was central to that process. Plasterwork itself is a marginalised field of study in architectural history and the thesis begins with a consideration of the historiography of plasterwork and the issues that arise from its study. The thesis then explores the place of Fairfax House, and specifically its plasterwork, in the culture and imagination of twentieth-century York, analysing the development of interest in the ‘Georgian’ and in the conservation of eighteenth-century buildings in York, the restoration of 1982-4 itself, and ends with a case study involving a close reading of the plasterwork on the Great Staircase in the house and an analysis of the way it has been interpreted and presented.

Contemporary art is increasingly present in museum and heritage programming as a mode of interpretation and a method of exploring and understanding particular places, histories or concepts, with the intention of increasing visitor 'engagement'. While this form of programming is becoming commonplace, little research exists in relation to visitor experiences of these works. Undertaken in the context of Arts Council England's agenda of 'demonstrating' the value of cultural engagement through 'robust credible research', this thesis explores the possibilities of 'knowing engagement' with these artwork and the ways in which they might achieve their complex and conjunctive aims of being both an ‘intervention’ and acting as ‘interpretation’. Working through a case study of artworks at the Imperial War Museum North (IWMN), which employs contemporary art as 'an affective alternative to a text-based, didactic explanation' in order to generate a 'critical historical consciousness' in visitors, this thesis challenges an epistemic deficit evident in current evaluation methodologies that depend on policy driven proxy measures of 'engagement' and neglect the complex ontological nature of visitors' encounters with these artworks in the museum space. Drawing on Rodney Harrison's notion of heritage as a 'collaborative, dialogical and material-discursive process', engagement with contemporary art interventions is considered with respect to instrumentalised cultural policy, affective encounters with the materiality of the case study artworks and notions of intervention and site specificity in aesthetic and institutional discourse. Considering the artworks as heterogeneous entities in relation to artists, the Museum, visitors, cultural policy and aesthetic discourse, this thesis suggests that prior to producing 'demonstrable' evidence of engagement, it is first necessary to understand the complexity of these artworks and the relationships through which they exist as cultural objects.

This research was developed as part of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, between the University of Leeds and Leeds Museums and Galleries. The central area for investigation was to establish the value to be gained from providing prisoners in a high security prison access to museum objects and activities inspired by them. The project itself was delivered to a group of prisoners in HMP Wakefield in 2012 over a twelve-week period. The four-stage project provided opportunities for different forms of interaction with the museum objects and culminated in a final exhibition of work created by the prisoner participants during the project. Throughout the project the findings were positive. They offer strong support to the idea that high security prisons can be viewed as a community in their own right where positive relationships can be established and negative stereotypes broken down. When looked at collectively, the findings indicate that participation in the project made both an immediate and longer-term impact on the wellbeing of those who participated. In some cases this also linked to a reduction in the fears associated with feeling institutionalised.

In this thesis I examine the Contemporary Arts Programme at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, with a particular focus on the commissioning and installation of artwork in the period interior of the museum. Reading the work of Paula Rego, Cornelia Parker, Su Blackwell, Charlotte Cory and Catherine Bertola through the literature of heritage and dialogical aesthetics, I seek to map the unexplored liminal territory between the Brontë Parsonage Museum as 'shrine' and the contemporary art installations as 'intervention'. The purpose, through following a trajectory which has its origin in what Malinowski described as 'foreshadowed problems', has been to produce a rich account of the ways in which art and heritage practices intersect. A reflexive ethnographic stance, in which the process has developed through and in, rather than prior to, the research process, acknowledges my own position as artist, museum educator and academic, engaged with a particular site where I have used visitor comment books and semi structured interviews with artists, staff and visitors to produce this account. This stance acknowledges that writing about art is itself a creative practice and should not be seen as existing as an independent, external addition; to be so, it would remain a 'shadow' of that which it describes. Instead, it is my purpose to map the complexity of these installations as points of reference in the broader topology of heritage practice and contemporary art to demonstrate that they are not reducible to the paradigmatic arguments which are used to describe their existence within the museum space. Often characterised as 'social outreach, public relations, economic development and art tourism', I argue it is more productive to consider these 'interventions' as dialogic heritage, both in order to understand their 'affective' role in the process of interpreting the legacy of the Brontës, and to understand ways in which they address visitor experience.

The central question that this thesis addresses is curatorial practice as an ethical practice, a practice of care. In the field of contemporary art and curatorial studies, the connection between curating and care is predominantly considered significant only in terms of the history of the curatorial care of collections, inscribed etymologically in the word ‘curator’ which derives from the Latin ‘cura’, which means ‘care’. Historical and discursive shifts in the later twentieth century have resulted in a situation where other affinities between care and curating are now almost entirely in eclipse. The thesis aims to re-establish the embeddedness of care in curatorial practice by posing the question of a specifically curatorial sense of care and responsibility for the ‘other’ in a relational, ethical sense. This is elaborated through two case studies, which have been selected for their relational conceptualisations, and engagement with a feminist and Indigenous/postcolonial politics of avoiding marginalisation and repression. My reading begins from the understanding that the ethical interweaves in several ways with the political and the aesthetic, as set out in Chapter One and Chapter Two. Part One presents the first case study, the curatorial practice of Catherine de Zegher and the exhibition Inside the Visible (1996). Chapter Three explores the development of de Zegher’s practice over the span of her career, and Inside the Visible through the archive, which is read for patterns of responsibility and acts of care. Chapter Four considers the exhibition as a widely-recognised feminist intervention, which may function as an instance of curatorial ethicality if it is not further subjected to contemporary repression in the literature. Part Two presents the second case study, the curatorial practice of Brenda L Croft and the co-curators of fluent in the Australian Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997). Chapter Five maps the development of Croft’s practice, and through a reading of the archive presents fluent as a demonstrably effective intervention into the globalised art world. In this chapter, responsibility and care are also framed broadly in relation to a specifically Indigenous conception of shared values, which is largely characterised in terms of relationality. Chapter Six considers the significance of Indigenous women’s participation in Venice, and the precarity of fluent’s position in the recent discourse on contemporaneity. Its almost total neglect in the literature threatens the exhibition’s efficacy, which against the wider repression of the relationality of Indigenous cultural practices has arguably destructive effects. Finally, the Conclusion reflects on the research process and the way of reading developed in the thesis. Across the case studies, a distinctive ethos of care is detectable in relational practices of responsibility strategised and enacted by curators, and in their sensitivity to relationality on multiple levels. These modes of practice are argued to re-inscribe an ethical concept of care in the fabric of curatorial practice. It is hoped that the thesis presents a framework through which to read and learn from these curatorial instances of care, signalling one potential way to break the cycle of repression and marginalisation.

This thesis traces the history of museums in Qatar to investigate a significant period of transformation - politically, economically and socially - and their role in the reordering of ' things'. I compare the way in which Qatari museums have been used during two different eras, from the 19705 to 1995 and from 1995 to the current day, to demonstrate how museums in Qatar have been politically driven and where they have been used to strengthen a national profile, locally. region ally and globally. A specific study of Qatar National Museum allows for an exploration of how Sheikh Khalifa's aims for the museums in the country changed the community's understanding of their everyday objects, when they were shown in a museum context as a part of a specific narrative of history and change. The economic, social and political paradigm shifts that Qatar is witnessing currently have brought about recognition of the need for a wider and more important role for museums and their acquisitions. Alongside moves to modernise the country, there has begun to be an emphasis on the need to preserve Qatar's traditions and heritage and the desire to rebuild some sites and cities from Qatar's hi story. Throughout these projects, Qatari and Islamic heritage have been utilised in the politicians' vision and plans for globalisation and modernisation. The new museum culture in Qatar acts as a very powerful tool to generate narratives about the country as a nation; however, the opening of these new museums invites debate about why certain objects have been brought together and why specific narratives have been constructed around them. I have completed this research as both a curator employed by the Museums Authority in Qatar since 1998, and as a doctoral student at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. This has created an interesting tension in my work. As an insider, I have had to engage with the cultural basis of understanding demanded of a curator working in Qatar. However, as a research student, I have been required to question, analyse and critique Qatari museum practice. This is the first thesis to explore the history of museums in Qatar conducted by a Qatari employed by the Museums Authority and I have addressed the challenges of this position in my research.