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 ...

The notion of heritage is closely linked to processes of change. In the Western context, the definition of heritage as "a contemporary product shaped from history" (Harvey 2010) highlights the extent to which our relationship with the past is being continually re-configured. However, there is a future dimension implied in this relationship that is often neglected; to paraphrase William Morris, the sense in which heritage testifies to the hopes and aspirations of those now passed away. Making ...

Many people are actively using working class heritage as a resource to reflect on the past and the present, and there is a growing tendency for the heritage of working class people to be interpreted and presented to the public in museums and heritage sites—see for example the Worklab network of museums. Working class communities and organizations also play active roles in creating a memory of their own past, and mobilizing this to sustain political action in the present. Drawing on scho...

In many parts of Europe and North America, but also in Australia, Japan and parts of China, regions of heavy industry, in particular regions of coal and steel industries, have been in decline since the 1960s. In many of these regions, the transition to post-industrial landscapes has provoked discussions surrounding industrial heritage, what to do with it and for which purposes. One of the most ambitious industrial heritage projects was initiated in the Ruhr region of Germany from the 1960s on...

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...

Photography was recognized as an instrument of heritage preservation from the moment of its inception in the early nineteenth century, when projects such as Les Excursions Daguerriennes (1841-1843), a set of Romantic engravings of monuments based on photographic documents, established the links between sight and science, memory and history, hortatory reification and ‘ruin lust’ (Brian Dillon, 2014). This session was conceived in the certain knowledge that almost every speaker at t...

While intangible cultural heritage is an important factor in maintaining cultural diversity in the face of growing globalization, there is still little appreciation of its value. UNESCO endorsed the importance of intangible cultural heritage not only as a cultural manifestation but also, and more importantly, as a wealth of knowledge and skills that are transmitted through generations. We invite paper contributions that address multiple ways of understanding, recognizing, valuing, and p...