Work package 1 : Theorizing heritage futures in Europe
This WP aims to better understand how heritage is implicated the future of Europe. It proceeds from an assumption that different fields of heritage and conservation practice assemble different kinds of futures, and that exploring them in comparative perspective will help practitioners understand how they might work together in identifying common objectives across the broad sectoral divisions of natural and cultural and tangible and intangible heritage conservation. Doing so will aid researchers and heritage practitioners in identifying connections with, and innovative and sustainable solutions to, key contemporary social, ecological and political issues in which the “heritage” and the “past” are implicated.
The WP aims to engage with current global crises—the “migrant crisis”, “Brexit” and the changing membership of the European Union, and climate change, for example—and the ways in which these crises might be viewed and analysed from the perspective of critical heritage studies. The WP has three key objectives:
1/To develop methodologies, based on broadly ethnographic approaches, which facilitate comparative perspectives on heritage across broad sectoral divisions.
2/To undertake comparative studies based on a dialogical model of heritage (Harrison 2013) drawing on these methods.
3/To explore the practical implications of working within an expanded field of heritage across sectoral divisions by exploring ways of linking the outcomes of this research to important contemporary social, political or ecological issues.
These objectives relate directly to the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (the Faro Convention), which specifies the need to promote integrated trans-sectoral approaches to cultural heritage and to facilitate more democratic participation in the identification and management of heritage values in society.
Useful links:
Heritage Futures (UCL)
Making Global Heritage Futures (UGOT – Centre for Critical Heritage Studies)
People involved in the theme Heritage futures
ESR 2
WP1 – Theorizing Heritage Futures
University College London [UK]
ESR 1
WP1 – Theorizing Heritage Futures
University Institute of Lisbon [PT]
Supervisor
WP1 – Heritage Futures
Instituto Universitário de Lisboa
Supervisor
WP1 – Heritage Futures
University College London