Maidment-Blundell, Laurence; (2025) "I don't really want to have hand to hand combat with someone who I know is right": how do volunteers contribute and respond to museum decolonisation? Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis presents a study that directly explores the responses and contributions of public-facing volunteers to museum decolonisation and explores the ways in which they are being trained and prepared to communicate colonial and decolonised histories through three different case studies. The thesis is cross-disciplinary in nature and brings together theorisation from: serious leisure, anti-colonial and decolonial theories such as a museology of hope and the operations of a critical pedagogy of place. Utilising these lenses and a multi-sited ethnographic approach with interviews, active participant observation and analysis of primary documents, this research: presumes an agentic and bottom-up view of volunteers and volunteering at each locale; explores how volunteers shape their own practice according to their needs and wants; and, interrogates how their sense of belonging, identity, purpose and practice are impacted by the potential changes brought about when decolonial practice is embraced. This thesis argues that support for and opposition to decolonisation and subsequent volunteer retention hinges not only upon the moral and political beliefs of volunteers, but also the ways in which they benefit from and construct their experience and practice as meaningful.

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