Industrial heritage in Britain has tended to be romanticised in museum ‘cathedrals’ and ‘theme parks’ (like Beamish), with workers’ lived experience subordinated to the machines, buildings and physical artefacts that dominate these spaces. Here workers’ lives are more often than not celebrated rather than critically reconstructed and interpreted. The politics, class relations and struggle, violence, poverty and murkier side of working life is increasingly being neglected as the past is san...

There is no doubt that the involvement of civil society is a key element in the history of heritage. Working upstream, in line with or against the tide of state recognition, enlightened amateurs or ordinary citizens have invested time and energy in the safeguarding and enhancement of a good, a place or a practice, judged, from their point of view, as irreplaceable or remarkable. It is easy for each country or each region to find an example of a precursor, working alone or in a group, who has ...

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...

Much is being made of the perceived breakdown of the nation-state, which was historically configured as a “container” of heritage formations, adopting and perusing local traditions where possible but oppressing them where deemed unsuitable. Migration is seen as eroding the rigid boundaries of this configuration, potentially liberating identities and heritages in the process. This session addresses the relationship between critical heritage and redefinitions of self, other, community and place...