Epistemologies and Methodologies
My Session Status
How can research contribute to the identification of what, in a given community or environment, constitutes heritage (whatever the name that is given to it) and what are the implications of this concept on heritage practices of conservation and valuation?
This session seeks to conceive how we can research this subject, what the methods and approaches might be.
Sub Sessions
This paper unpacks the language and corresponding classification system used when discussing heritage. Following a Foulcauldian logic, the results of this ever-changing lexicon mean that our understanding of "heritage" changes geographically, and over short spans of time, as new names come to supplant old ones, making others obsolete. The concrete results of this are that heritage is now made to fit these precise definitions, impacting real-world decisions and economics. This paper will share...
In the past decades, major historic cities throughout China are redesigning themselves as exemplary architectural and cultural spaces representing critical periods in their past. Datong, a major city centre in the north of China, is following a similar pattern of 'reconstruction,' transforming this old cold mining city to the ancient Chinese capital. Many public places in Datong including the city wall have been integrated into the heritage-led urban planning. Why did Datong's municipal gover...
The relationships linking heritage and tourism are often articulated around a discourse drawing from world heritage that grafts itself onto a reflection of international touristic development. As a consequence, the vocabularies of tourism and heritage, induced by the process of the inscription of sites confers to them a manner of instantaneous political and social recognition, as well as an elevated status; of desirability almost mechanically inscribed within a logic of heritage commercializa...
