My research is concerned with problematic relationships between museums and colonialism, particularly focusing on local museums and collections found in North-East Thailand. Using multi-sited museography, I explore the trajectories of things and differences of curatorial practices in collections concerned, or linked, with ‘the sacred’. My thesis explores local museums situated in the colonial contexts of South-East Asia, especially the Mekong Region dating back to the late 19th century, and argues against seeing them as either non-professional or non-western. Instead, I propose to see them as practices that resist and are in dialogue with other museums that collected and curated the same kind of objects e.g. Thai national museums, university museums, and city museums.

The research draws substantially on my prior work on dynamics and meanings of local museums in Thailand and my MA research at the University of York, UK concerning two local museums in North Yorkshire. This illustrates how images and stories of the Ryedale countryside in local museums are in dialogue with the idyll image of the English countryside, and reflect forgotten histories and unbalanced relationships between the North and the South of England. Since 2012, my postgraduate study has been grant-funded by Thammasat University, Thailand where I joined as a lecturer in the Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology in 2008.