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Dr. Inger Birkeland

Associate Professor
University College of Southeast Norway
Participates in 1 Session
My professional background is human geography with MA and PhD from University of Oslo, Norway (2002). I have twenty years of experience in teaching and research in higher education, from human geography, teacher training (geography), tourism and cultural management and cultural studies. For the past four years I have been active in the European research network COST Action IS1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability (2011-2015), where I have chaired a working group on theoretical and conceptual work. My research interest in the Action has been to explore theoretically the role of culture in sustainable development. Overall research experience is nature-society relations, people-place relations, place pedagogies and place-conscious teaching and learning, cultural sustainability, and climate change transformation through heritage-making, and particularly relating to uses of industrial heritage. Among my publications are one book on place- and self-making in nature-based tourism among international travellers to Northern Norway (“Making Place, Making Self” published by Ashgate in 2005) and a book on the role of culture and social learning for sustainable place planning in post-industrial region Rjukan and Notodden in Norway ("Kulturelle hjørnesteiner", Cappelen Damm Akademisk 2014). Ongoing project is a co-edited book, "Cultural Sustainability and the Nature-Culture Interface", to be published in Routledge Series in Culture and Sustainable Development.

Sessions in which Dr. Inger Birkeland participates

Sunday 5 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Sessions in which Dr. Inger Birkeland attends

Friday 3 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
11:30
11:30 - 13:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Urban HeritageTourism

What does heritage change for tourism? | Le patrimoine, ça change quoi au tourisme? Ce débat veut interroger les relations entre le tourisme et le patrimoine et dépasser ainsi les idées reçues sur l'antagonisme entre le tourisme "corrupteur" et le patrimoine qui en serait la victime. Il s'agit donc de repenser le tourisme comme un réel acteur du patrimoine, de sa valorisation et de son appropriation, y compris par les populations locales. Cela présuppose, au p...

13:00
13:00 - 15:00 | 2 hours
Heritage as an Agent of Change (Epistemologies, Ontologies, Teaching)

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.  

17:00
17:00 - 19:30 | 2 hours 30 minutes
Festive Event

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...

Saturday 4 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00
9:00 - 10:00 | 1 hour
Public event
Simultaneous translation - Traduction simultanée

What if we changed our views on heritage? And if heritage has already changed? While, on the global scene, states maintain their leading role in the mobilization of social and territorial histories, on the local scale, regions, neighbourhoods and parishes have changed. Citizens and communities too: they latch on to heritage to express an unprecedented range of belongings that no law seems to be able to take measures to contain, often to the discontent of...

11:00
11:00 - 17:00 | 6 hours
Changes in Heritage (New Manifestations)Notions of HeritageArchitecture and Urbanism
Changes in heritageNew manifestations of heritageNotions of heritage

The notion of heritage is closely linked to processes of change. In the Western context, the definition of heritage as "a contemporary product shaped from history" (Harvey 2010) highlights the extent to which our relationship with the past is being continually re-configured. However, there is a future dimension implied in this relationship that is often neglected; to paraphrase William Morris, the sense in which heritage testifies to the hopes and aspirations of those now passed away. Making ...

13:30
13:30 - 17:00 | 3 hours 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Living EnvironmentIndustrial HeritageUrban HeritageArchitecture and Urbanism
Heritage changes the environmentHeritage values

In many parts of Europe and North America, but also in Australia, Japan and parts of China, regions of heavy industry, in particular regions of coal and steel industries, have been in decline since the 1960s. In many of these regions, the transition to post-industrial landscapes has provoked discussions surrounding industrial heritage, what to do with it and for which purposes. One of the most ambitious industrial heritage projects was initiated in the Ruhr region of Germany from the 1960s on...

18:30
18:30 - 20:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Public event
Simultaneous translation - Traduction simultanée

Most of what we experience as heritage emerges into conscious recognition through a complex mixture of political and ideological filters, including nationalism.  In these processes, through a variety of devices (museums, scholarly research, consumer reproduction, etc.), dualistic classifications articulate a powerful hierarchy of value and significance.  In particular, the tangible-intangible pair, given legitimacy by such international bodies as UNESCO, reproduces a selective ordering of cul...

Sunday 5 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
14:00
14:00 - 15:30 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Co-Construction and Community Based HeritageHeritage Changes the Social OrderCitizenshipPublic event
Simultaneous translation - Traduction simultanée

"What does heritage change?" is a multifaceted  question to which the answer(s) are in primary respects related to real-life negotiations among different groups of citizens, cultures, races, ethnic groups, sexual identities, and social classes about received, official and/or widely accepted or accomodated intangible attributes, cultural traditions, historic monuments, buildings, and other transmitted or revived historical legacies. Heritage designated by and for whom, for what motivations, an...

Monday 6 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00
9:00 - 12:30 | 3 hours 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Social OrderActivists and ExpertsPublic event
Heritage changes peopleActivist vs expertHeritage-makers

As recent publications have demonstrated, the role of the expert in heritage conservation is a relevant, indeed imperative topic of discussion. On the one hand, the knowledge required to work in the field has evolved over time in response to changes in the definition of heritage. Once the exclusive domain of architects and historians, the expertise needed today draws on a broader scope of disciplines including urban planning, landscape studies, anthropology, economics and climatology, often m...

9:00 - 15:00 | 6 hours
Heritage as an Agent of Change (Epistemologies, Ontologies, Teaching)Urban HeritageArchitecture and Urbanism
Heritage as an agent of changeEpistemologiesOntologiesTeaching

Cities are growingly being faced by social, economic, cultural and environmental challenges imposing health and social risks. Rapid urbanization, population growth, climate change are only some of the major global challenges that a 21st century city needs to respond to. The current challenging global environment has led to the development of new approaches to the concept of "sustainable city" a city that caters for current and future generation. For instance, the idea of smart city (a city th...

13:30
13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes PlaceCo-Construction and Community Based HeritageActivists and Experts

Involving communities, visitors or the public is frequently presented as one of the major tasks of museums and heritage sites in current global movements toward new collaborative paradigms (Golding and Modest 2013; Watson and Waterton 2011). Co-production is a highly current issue, and a proposed emancipatory solution to the authorized heritage discourse, which seemingly has reached a critical juncture. Scholarship has echoed calls from communities for more direct involvement in the presentat...

15:30
15:30 - 17:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Public event
Simultaneous translation - Traduction simultanée

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...

Tuesday 7 June, 2016

Time Zone: (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
9:00
9:00 - 15:00 | 6 hours
Heritage Changes PlaceCo-Construction and Community Based HeritageActivists and Experts
Heritage changes placeCo-construction of heritageCommunity-based heritageHeritage makers

Involving communities, visitors or the public is frequently presented as one of the major tasks of museums and heritage sites in current global movements toward new collaborative paradigms (Golding and Modest 2013; Watson and Waterton 2011). Co-production is a highly current issue, and a proposed emancipatory solution to the authorized heritage discourse, which seemingly has reached a critical juncture. Scholarship has echoed calls from communities for more direct involvement in the presentat...

13:30
13:30 - 15:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage as an Agent of Change (Epistemologies, Ontologies, Teaching)Activists and ExpertsPublic event
Heritage as an agent of changeEpistemologiesOntologiesTeaching

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...

15:30
15:30 - 17:00 | 1 hour 30 minutes
Heritage Changes the Local SocietiesMuseums
Heritage changes the local societiesheritage and mobilityPost-colonial heritageGlobal vs local

To date, very little literature explicitly explores the relationships of museums and heritage to historical consciousness, despite the overlapping concerns shared by these respective fields. This roundtable addresses the subject of museums as sites of historical consciousness by reflecting on a recent book project. Museums as Sites of Historical Consciousness: Perspectives on Museum Theory and Practice in Canada (working title, UBC Press, 2016) examines (1) ways that museums create and sha...

19:00
19:00 - 23:00 | 4 hours
Festive Event

The closing dinner of the conference, called “Pawâ” according to a French-Canadian tradition borrowed from the Native American lexicon, will be an opportunity to discover, in the heart of the Old Port of Montreal, an original culinary creation by the caterer Agnus Dei, from the renowned Maison Cartier-Besson in Montreal, leader in its field for its boundless creativity and event expertise. The dinner, in the form of stations, will offer delegates an exploration of Quebecois culinary heritage,...