Established in 1994, The International Journal of Heritage Studies (IJHS) was, in hindsight, a landmark in the development of heritage studies. It offered a friendly scholarly haven for in which academics, practitioners and policy makers could publish their insights. It provided an outlet for work that might be seen by some journals as marginal or too focused on sites or management issues to be seen as viable, or in others as too interested in the ‘soft’ issues of heritage management. Over the years, it attracted an eclectic body of contributions from people in archaeology, conservation, architecture, tourism studies, geography and museology.  

In 2011, the Critical Heritage Studies Association was established, and its first conference held in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2012, which was sponsored by the IJHS. Prior to this, and with increasing frequency since, the IJHS has published a growing volume of work arising from this conference, or research that shares an increasingly broad but critically engaged approach to broadening heritage studies away from its roots in conservation and heritage management.  

This paper examines what critical heritage studies has changed through analyzing the profile of articles published in the IJHS, and papers delivered at the associated ACHS conferences. We focus on their geographical spread, research themes/subjects, methodologies and related disciplinary methods. Papers published in the journal, and submitted to the conferences, are divided into three categories (case study, theory and policy), and highlight three critical transformations: from case study-based papers to explorations of theory, from place-based to transnational or international scales, and from conservation and discipline based study to cross-disciplinary and critical views of heritage. We argue that the development of the journal and the conferences have not simply reflected, but also actively moulded debates about the nature and meanings of heritage. Consequently, they have become an arena where interdisciplinary interaction and active dialogue between scholars and practitioners takes place.