Glimpsing "cultural democracy" within the Migration Museum and Turner Contemporary. An ethnographic account

This thesis explores cultural democracy as a dynamic and contested process, emerging through everyday encounters, institutional practices, and uneven power relations within museum spaces. At its core, it asks: How is cultural democracy—understood as both a policy discourse and a lived, contested practice—negotiated, staged, and experienced in two UK museum spaces, and what do these encounters reveal about the possibilities and limits of cultural participation today? Through a comparative ethnography of Turner Contemporary in Margate and the Migration Museum in London, the study examines how cultural democracy is articulated, implemented, and contested across organisational structures, curatorial choices, and visitor experiences. The research is grounded in three years of fieldwork (2021–2024), combining participant observation, 52 semi-structured interviews, focus groups, collaborative workshops, and informal conversations. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, bell hooks, and Donna Haraway, the thesis develops a framework that foregrounds relationality, tension, and dissensus as central to cultural democracy. It employs the metaphors of the temple and the forum to reflect on how museums function both as sites of aesthetic contemplation and as arenas for public debate. While these models provide useful heuristics, the case studies show how museums oscillate between them, producing hybrid practices that blur distinctions between authority and participation. The findings suggest that cultural democracy is best understood as a continuous struggle. What seems like participation on paper is, in reality, the result of competing forces: funding regimes and evaluation metrics, colonial legacies and de/re-contextualised collections, urban regeneration and housing precarity, architectural atmospheres and spatial codes, curatorial authority and co-creation, institutional and community labour. These forces interact unevenly, generating frictions that must be negotiated daily by educators, curators, volunteers, and visitors. Therefore, cultural democracy emerges not as a fixed outcome but as an ongoing process of mediation, contestation, and care. Methodologically, the project enacted elements of cultural democracy through Ethnographic Action Research, co-designed workshops, and KEI exchanges. These practices decentralised the research, opened dialogic spaces between institutions, and created feedback loops where participants shaped questions, interpretations, and outputs. While partial and imperfect, this approach materialised democratic practice by sharing curatorial voice, valuing situated 10 knowledge, and treating disagreement as productive. In this way, the method became both a way of knowing and a contribution to practice: a small-scale infrastructure for reflexivity, reciprocity, and institutional learning. By situating cultural democracy within these negotiations, the thesis contributes to theoretical debates in museum studies, cultural sociology, and critical pedagogy, while also speaking to policy and practice. It rethinks museums not simply as guardians of culture but as dynamic, agonistic spaces where identities, meanings, and relationships are continually contested. By foregrounding struggle and dissensus, it calls for more inclusive and reflexive approaches to cultural participation, while recognising the limits of what museums can achieve within wider social and political constraints.