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...

Architectural historian John R. Stubbs suggests that architectural conservation is concerned with historic buildings and their sites as well as their associated accoutrements, such as furnishings and fittings. But what happens if the building itself is not seen as “historic” or even worthy of a heritage designation, much less conservation, while its site and furnishings are significant in aesthetic, cultural or social terms; in other words what happens when a building’s decorative arts tru...

In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate surrounding so-called ruin gazing and the politics of representing industrial or urban ruination. Recent years have seen photographers, artists, film-makers, urban explorers, scholars and others flood into newly deindustrialized areas to record signs of ruins and abandonment, prompting a public backlash against the hipster commodification of misery. Some have gone so far as to call the voyeuristic appeal of industrial or urban ruinatio...

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 ...

Space plays a crucial role in the production and meaning-making of cultural heritage. Although space has often been discussed in heritage studies, further critical analysis of the constructive and performative nature of space, in particular that of scale and territoriality, is needed in order to understand the power hierarchies and mechanisms of power in cultural heritage and in various conflicts related to its meanings, ownership, preservation and management. The idea of cultural herit...

This session is committed to extending previous research collaborations on food and culinary systems as objects of political mobilization – ICA 52, 2006 (Seville); Mexico DF, 2009; ICA 54, 2012 (Vienna); Uqam, 2014 (Montreal). On this occasion, we will deepen and develop ongoing debates about the growing place of food in the cultural politics of heritage and its impacts on society, about which there is still scarce documentation.  How are food and culinary heritages constructed and...

Questions about the repatriation of cultural property, issues of access and exclusion in the World Heritage system, intangible heritage practices in conflict with human rights norms, or the ways in which the international human rights regime is interpreted as a form of cultural heritage itself: rights are now considered relevant in a broad variety of heritage situations. This is reflected in the incorporation of references to human rights in a series of key international heritage-relate...

Dans le cadre d’une réflexion pluridisciplinaire croisant anthropologie, archéologie, architecture, géographie, histoire, politologie, cette séance propose des lectures empiriques du patrimoine matériel et immatériel en situation conflictuelle. Le patrimoine sera interrogé en tant que construction sociale à valeur symbolique, catalyseur d’appropriation et/ou de fabrications identitaires et objet de discours mémoriels.   Dans des contextes politiques autoritaires, et où la contestat...

Recent writing in heritage studies and related disciplines has highlighted the stories and histories of working class people as an overlooked and, at times, marginalized element of the collective heritage imaginary and authorized heritage discourses (Klubock and Fontes 2009; Shackel, Smith and Campbell 2011). The heritage of work has the potential to generate powerful and at times difficult engagements with places where the nature of employment, industry and life have changed as a result of d...

This session will address the potential and limitations of heritage as a tool for leverage, empowerment and dissent in Africa. It is widely acknowledged that heritage—the selective valuation and use of the past in the present—can be an oppressive. Heritage work in Africa has even been characterized as "an instrument for dictatorship" (Peterson et al. 2015:28) because it is often implicated in upholding particular narratives and political orders, imposing a singular vision onto a heterog...

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...

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...

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...

The Manifesto of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies (2011) argues for a more critical approach to heritage: heritage from below, writ large, in service of society. The integration of heritage and museum studies with those of community, development, memory, planning, public history and tourism is urged in the Manifesto, as is opening up to other disciplinary traditions such as anthropology, political science and sociology, for dialogue and collaboration on external research and poli...

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...

International exhibitions have long been promoted for their potential to connect people, objects and stories across political, cultural and geographical divides. Recent commentators have linked touring exhibitions to cultural globalization, diplomacy and the advancement of intercultural understanding, while others have critiqued them as revenue generators driven by public appeal or as "politically-safe" forms of national branding. Very few studies, however, have attempted to empirically inves...

In addressing the theme of this conference, we argue that archaeology, above and beyond the traditional goals of research and post-excavation analyses, may contribute to economic development, education and the creation of identities and communities. Our session "What does Heritage Change? Case Studies in Archaeology," is divided into two themes starting with archaeological practice through its legislation and management. Contract or commercial archaeology increasingly comprises the vast major...

In a collaborative and image-rich conversational presentation, “Teaching/Learning/Living Post-Industrial Ecologies” outlines the potentials and problematics of “The Right to the City,” a multi-year transdisciplinary curriculum initiative that brings graduate and undergraduate students from Concordia University to Montreal’s historic South West borough. Through our tethered teaching, four professors have asked, “what does it change for the university to teach/learn on-site with the resident...

The session addresses the role of physical walls and boundaries in the construction of separate cultural identities. It is often said that “fences make good neighbors,” but walls and fences also serve to create physical boundaries that both divide communities and leave behind a heritage of new and divergent identities. Two of the papers in this session (Donnan and Laurents) address the impact of the so-called “Peace Walls” erected in multiple Belfast neighborhoods after 1969. Thoug...

This proposal makes the case that heritage’s capacity for change may be dependent on a paradigm shift in how heritage is interpreted. With this paradigm shift in play, a question is then asked: Can authenticity be used as a design driver to resolve how best to incorporate the four pillars of sustainability in a building’s design? The proposal begins with a discussion about the difference between using heritage reactively and proactively. It then presents a brief introduction to the...

Private sector cultural heritage evaluation, protection, and management in Ontario exists at the nexus of academic theory, legislative direction, and land-use planning. Heritage work in this context follows a conservation approach to mitigate the loss of identified resources due to urban and infrastructure development. Ideally, the process balances ‘expert knowledge’ with regular and protracted engagement with government agencies, communities, and individuals to create evaluation criteria,...

De l’ère du Maire Drapeau et de ses interventions autoritaires sur le tissu urbain de Montréal dans les années 1960 et 1970, à l’instauration d’une démocratie municipale dans les années 1980 sous l’administration Doré, la population est de plus en plus sollicitée dans les grands débats concernant la transformation du patrimoine urbain de Montréal (Drouin 2005). Notons l’instauration en 2002 de l’Office de consultation publique de Montréal, tribune où les citoyens peuvent donner leurs avis ...

L’objectif de cette table ronde est de questionner une éventuelle ratification par le Canada de cet instrument multilatéral. La réunion se tiendra en français et en anglais avec interprétation simultanée. Elle prendra la forme d’exposés d’experts et de tables de discussion. Une consultation sera préalablement menée auprès des principaux groupes de praticiens du pays afin de recueillir leur avis sur la question de la ratification et de nourrir les échanges de la réunion. Dif...

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...

This session discusses the ways in which early public housing from the 1950s to 1960s in Hong Kong, China, and Singapore have emerged recently as an arena for the critique of national, elite or dominant notions of heritage and history. The contexts of the development of public housing in the early post-Second World War era and the background to their recent reappraisal as significant sites for the edification of cultural identity or socio-political struggle provide grounds for exploration of ...