Abigail Webster

Abigail’s doctoral thesis, 'Politics of Administrative Infrastructures: Contemporary Art Organisations and the State in Scotland' (2025), investigated the entanglement of art and the British state. The study was bookended by a contemporary analysis, beginning with Creative Scotland, a public body that distributes cultural funding, and concluding with three case studies (a gallery, an artist-run organisation, and a network body). Through this, she demonstrated how the parameters of possibility for organisational governance are circumscribed by the state; often in ways that run counter to principles of de-hierarchisation and ‘self-determination’.

In between, five thematic chapters traced administrative genealogies. A chapter on ‘inspection’ examined the role of school inspectors at the advent of the Arts Council of Great Britain, situating this alongside Marx’s writings on the factory inspector and the contemporary internalisation of monitoring practices. ‘Financial health’, a criterion of funding eligibility, was examined as a prognostic metaphor that naturalises concrete practices of cost control and revenue generation. ‘Equality and diversity’, a cultural policy objective imbued with rhetorical promise, was examined in relation to the enumeration of populations within colonial regimes, critiques of the Arts Council’s early attempts at ethnic categorisation through the lens of political blackness, and the rise of public sector auditing culture in the late twentieth century.