Reflecting my work on museums, heritage and community, I have published Museums and Community: Ideas, Issues and Challenges (Routledge 2007) and Politics Archaeology and the creation of a national museum of Ireland (Irish Academic Press 2000).
I am co-investigator on the AHRC and HLF funded project Living Legacies 1914-18: From past conflict to shared future. I work closely with the museum sector in Ireland, I am Chairperson of Board of Directors Northern Ireland Museums Council and on the Board of Directors of the Irish Museums Association.
Currently I am working in the areas of community, memory and material culture. Some recent work includes:
- ‘Artefacts as Agents for Change: Commemoration and Exchange via Material Culture' in Irish Political Studies (2016 31, 1).
- 'The "active museum": How concern with community transformed the museum' in McCarthy (ed) Museum Practice in The International Handbooks of Museum Studies (eds Macdonald and Leahy) (2015) Wiley Blackwell 978-4051-9850-9
- And as an example of community engagement work, please view this short film: https://vimeo.com/164385098?lite=1
Sessions in which Prof Elizabeth Crooke participates
Sunday 5 June, 2016
Tuesday 7 June, 2016
What is the future of the UK and what is the role of heritage in this shifting political landscape? How have debates on heritage in the UK changed since the influential critiques of Hewison and Wright in the 1980s? How can those engaged in Critical Heritage Studies in the UK negotiate the difficult relationship between academic critique and sector relevance? How do current debates in the UK relate to and differ from those in Western and non-Western contexts? This workshop will bring ...
Sessions in which Prof Elizabeth Crooke 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...
Saturday 4 June, 2016
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...
Heritage practices often lead to social exclusion. As an "Authorized Heritage Discourse" (AHD) (Smith 2006) may define what is considered to be heritage, a certain set of social values can come to exclude other values. By formulating heritage policies which reproduce the existing AHD government may further such exclusion. Every now and then AHDs are challenged, leading to what political scientists like Ross (2007; 2009) call "cultural contestations" between groups. These are surrounded ...
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
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...
Monday 6 June, 2016
There are many different kinds of migrants in the contemporary world. They include the familiar figures of refugees or undocumented migrants, associated with and suffering from exclusionary practices, poverty, silencing or repressions; skilled migrants with economic resources but lacking the tools for cultural and social integration; migrants or second generation migrants returning to their homelands and becoming "strangers" there; people moving to several countries as global nomads, etc. An ...
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...
This session seeks to explore the role of urban heritage in mediating and contesting political conflict in the context of divided cities. We take urban heritage in a broad sense to include places left, scarred or transformed by geo-political dispute, national and ethnic division, violence and war. The case studies can include tangible spaces such as elements of border architecture, historic sites, ruins and urban traces of the conflict, and memorials; as well as intangible elements of city, i...
Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical and historical contexts. Since the late 1980s, the phenomenon of contestation in heritage has been increasingly recognized. However, there is still little detailed and situated knowledge about the range of actors present in contestations, the variety of strategies they pursue, the reasoning behind their choices, the networks they develop, and how, from all this, heritage has been and is constructed. More often than not, con...
Around the globe the planning of large-scale memorial-museum projects concerned with violent histories are frequently marred by conflict, omission, and competitions of victimhood. This problem also extends to scholarship on genocide and memory. “Moving memory” is a collaborative multi-sited research exhibition about the Armenian and Roma genocides that proposes creative solutions to these museological and scholarly conflicts around commemoration. Our multi-sited event includes two pr...
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
Heritage has multiple, concurrent origins. It is performed and produced by individuals, groups and organizations, or institutions on various scales. It is a transformative process and thus closely connected to the transitional. In heritage, transitionality may be usefully conceptualized under the rubric of the liminal, which at its core anticipates change and transformation, structure-agency relationships, affect, and human experience—all significant issues in recent theoretical debates in th...
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...
What is the future of the UK and what is the role of heritage in this shifting political landscape? How have debates on heritage in the UK changed since the influential critiques of Hewison and Wright in the 1980s? How can those engaged in Critical Heritage Studies in the UK negotiate the difficult relationship between academic critique and sector relevance? How do current debates in the UK relate to and differ from those in Western and non-Western contexts? This workshop will bring ...
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...
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,...