Millar, Alice; (2025) Difficult Politics and Difficult Objects: an ethnography of museum staff and social media in the UK. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Over the last decade, museums and heritage sites have been the scene of heated debates described by print media using the polemic label “culture wars". In this study, I interrogate the usefulness of “culture wars” as an ethnographic concept that refers to how cultural differences, whether real or imagined, are mobilised to create a society that is polarised along horizontal lines according to binaries such as insider/outsider, liberal/conservative, woke/anti-woke. Drawing on data collected over 16 months primarily at the Museum of London and the Migration Museum, complemented by interviews with sector professionals across the UK, I present here one of the first ethnographic explorations of how this definition of the culture wars is experienced in practice in museum work. I explore specifically how print and social media are taken up as expressive populist tools to critique and challenge museums in unexpected ways. I investigate how these populist tools come together with other tensions arising from new technologies, political unrest, internal bureaucracy and underfunding. I refer to this combination of concerns as “difficult politics,” following Sharon Macdonald’s concept of “difficult heritage,” and use it as a term through which to critique the usefulness of the vernacular term “culture wars”. The second part of this dissertation focusses on how digital media practices are used by staff to understand and work through these fraught contexts. I look at how social media is tamed and recontextualised in museum practices by looking at case studies where born-digital and social media objects were collected and displayed as traditional objects and how museum staff have begun to view themselves and their workplaces as flat or circular networks, in contrast to earlier models of hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions. I argue that museum staff try to use novel digital practices as a way to push back against these difficult politics but that the historical and political structures operational within museums prevent staff and institutions from freely transcending these difficult politics.

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