Craik-Hyde, Miriam A. M.; (2023) Reframing the Framemakers: A Critical Exploration of Co-Curation in Two Museum-Based Projects. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

	Text (Thesis (redacted)) Miriam Craik-Hyde- PHD THESIS FINAL 2023 -redacted.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 June 2025. Download (12MB)
	Text (Appendix) M Craik-Hyde - PhD Thesis Appendix.pdf - Supplemental Material Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 June 2025. Download (11MB)

Abstract

‘Co-curation’ has emerged as a panacea for museums and galleries to remain relevant and is understood as encompassing collaborative cultural and mediational practices involving external stakeholders. This research began from an unease in my professional practice as a museum learning curator approaching co-curation with community members. Responding to scholarship suggesting current institutional conditions produce ethical tensions in cocurating, the research aimed to demystify what governs co-curators’ experiences and how such tensions might be mitigated. It also questioned what it means to co-curate, and what, or whose, meanings co-curating produces that would otherwise lay unrealised. The research adopted qualitative case study strategy, underpinned by a praxis approach emphasising participants as knowers. This strategy comprised an analytic design incorporating Institutional Ethnography to examine, from interview data and institutional documents, how participants’ positions interact with hierarchy and privilege in institution-led co-curation. The research’s pluralistic conceptual foundation yielded layered cross-case analyses, contributing new understandings concerning co-curation’s social organisation. The main contribution resulting was a 'Communal Reflective Framework', guiding recommendations for future engagements. This novel framework proposed questions that triangulate co-curation’s ethical concerns with three overarching practice themes emerging from the analysis: Stewardship, Production, and Story. The thesis claims co-curation’s distinctiveness reflects an inherently unstable, pluralistic nature governed by the social, economic and epistemological contexts of its use. Despite associations with anti-hierarchical collaboration and cultural activism, co-curation’s asymmetric institutional participation appears to actively regulate participants’ meaning-making potential. Further, the research learnt that, rather than necessitating mitigation, asymmetric co-participation can promote qualities that many value, including expertise. If the panacea of co-curation was a faltering answer to inequities of cultural participation and knowledge legitimation, this research offers instead an appreciation of the imperfect journeys museum professionals and external collaborators can make together through shared enterprise, and new Communal Reflective Framework to help scaffold their processes.

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