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...

Working with archival documents and the current-day morphology of the Grey Nuns' site, Dr Cynthia Hammond, Dr Shauna Janssen, in collaboration with Dr Jill Didur, will curate a series of installations and performances that speak directly to the rich heritage of a specific urban landscape: the gardens of the Grey Nuns' Motherhouse, now part of the Concordia University downtown campus. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore the lost working gardens of the Grey Nuns. As with other such...

Since the beginning of the 19th century religious buildings and artefacts of the West have been involved in a continuous process of musealization. In the time-period subsequent to the Second World War, the general forces of secularisation increasingly turned religious buildings, most of them churches, into heritage and substantial parts of Christian practices into history. On a global scale (Western), conservation and heritage practices have been applied on tangible and intangible expressions...

To celebrate our film series dedicated to heritage, sponsored by the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland and the United States Chapter of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, this event will spotlight the iconic Sugar Shack, which is rooted from Quebec to New-England and which is both the place of maple syrup production and of friendly gatherings during the maple syrup season. In a festive atmosphere, delegates will be invited to taste one of the essential of...

The second half of the 20th century saw the affirmation of national and international heritage administrations run by teams of experts that mutually validated each other’s knowledge and findings. The emergence of new forms of heritage, new collections and international networks related to museums, or other heritage structures, has led to the development of numerous new or reformulated specialities. In the last two decades a new ideal of heritage has gained ground, one based on communities ...

What is involved in presenting the past as a physical object in public space? There is a significant literature by scholars in various disciplines that deals with the array of decisions that need to be made regarding which stories should be told, and how they should be represented. Nevertheless, once constructed, there is a tendency to see these objects as natural, as if they had to be built and could not have been constructed any other way. The Lost Stories project is designed to involve ...