After finishing my PhD on the Irish Bronze Age in 2000, I moved my focus forward in time and began studying zoos as ritual landscapes. Working for English Heritage for ten years gave me a solid, if critical, understanding of heritage management. My first foray into the future was for a project collaborating with artists in Broadmead, Bristol. I am particularly interested in the way children are used in future discourse. I live in Portsmouth and am based in the Institute of Archaeology at UCL.
Sessions in which Dr Sarah May participates
Saturday 4 June, 2016
Sessions in which Dr Sarah May attends
Friday 3 June, 2016
This forum will explore the current directions of critical heritage studies and what makes ACHS distinctive. Panel members will discuss what the term critical means to them, and what directions they would like to see develop in the future. To help develop an open dialogue, the session will also give considerable time to contributions from the audience.
Welcome addresses and cocktail, followed by the Concordia Signature Event "The Garden of the Grey Nuns". As the opening ceremony and cocktail take place in the former Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, recycled into campus residence and reading rooms by Concordia University, delegates will also have the possibility to discover the video Three Grey Nuns (3 minutes, by Ron Rudin and Phil Lichti. Three Grey Nuns recount their memories of communal life in the Grey Nun’s Motherhouse. Built...
Monday 6 June, 2016
The field of heritage has emerged as a key site of reflection. Influenced by shifts in the academy (e.g., post-colonial, post-structural and feminist theories), heritage scholars are bringing increased attention to the deployment of heritage as both a conceptual category and a contested field of power and discourse. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain in communicating what comprises the theoretical and methodological toolkit of heritage studies. Scholars are still mapping out the nuan...
Le patrimoine fait aujourd’hui l’objet d’attentions autant que d’agressions et de destructions. Cela peut s’expliquer par les difficultés de son identification ou de sa conservation. Cela peut plus profondément s’expliquer parce que, dès le départ, il célébre un événement ou conserve une mémoire qui peut être ou devenir une source de dissenssions et de conflits politiques. Enfin, sa reconnaissance suscite des gains économiques pour les uns mais des pertes pour les autres. Mais peut-être...
To celebrate our film series dedicated to heritage, sponsored by the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland and the United States Chapter of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, this event will spotlight the iconic Sugar Shack, which is rooted from Quebec to New-England and which is both the place of maple syrup production and of friendly gatherings during the maple syrup season. In a festive atmosphere, delegates will be invited to taste one of the essential of...
Tuesday 7 June, 2016
We would like to propose a session, building on the one we ran at the 2014 CHS conference in Canberra, on how emotion and affect feature in the fields of heritage and museums studies, memory studies, public history, heritage tourism, studies of the built and urban environment, conservation, archives and any field of study that deals with the emotional impact and use of the past in the present. There is an increasing interest in how emotion is a form of judgement on things that affect ou...
The roundtable will explore ideas around the concept of insignificance. That is, how things are judged to be unimportant, not worthy of conservation, meaningless, or without substantive power or influence. We will examine this notion in relation to the history, theory, and practical application of significance as a concept and method in heritage. In short, we will discuss the significance of insignificance. The notion of ‘significance’ is central to heritage conservation in many pa...