*L'atelier de recherche-création sera en anglais / This research-creation workshop will be in English By using experimental and anthropological theatre’s tools, it is a sensitive exploration into the heart of questions of art, exile, heritage and transmission that I propose to lead here. How do we grasp as closely as possible the committed creations of Mizrahi artists and their aspirations, if not by artistic creation itself? The performance will become my space of research, s...

As the interface between past and present, heritage is deeply involved in articulations of personal and group identity, working to unite and harmonize group relations, and, simultaneously causing frictions, fractions, and violence. Critical heritage theory reveals that values and approaches to heritage are articulated both within and across regions (such as Asia, or Europe). A vital, and as yet unanswered, question centres on the degree to which heritage in Asia fundamentally differs from ...

In exploring the broader question “What does heritage change?” this session presents work that is extending heritage policies and practices beyond elite cultural narratives. Using diverse disciplinary perspectives and drawing from case studies around the world, the presenters explore contexts in which stakeholders’ perspectives and choices have been catalysts for change, democratized knowledge, or exposed gaps in contemporary heritage practices. The case studies reveal complex and often conte...

Dans la tradition occidentale, le patrimoine culturel trouverait ses fondements «dans le concept chrétien de l’héritage sacré de la foi» (Babelon et Chastel 1994), dont la conservation des objets religieux sous l’Antiquité et le culte des reliques seraient les prémices. Posant alors le principe du «transfert de sacralité», on emprunta le vocabulaire et les techniques du premier pour construire le second, qualifiant ainsi le fait patrimonial comme le culte laïc des productions humaines. Le sac...

We would like to propose a session, building on the one we ran at the 2014 CHS conference in Canberra, on how emotion and affect feature in the fields of heritage and museums studies, memory studies, public history, heritage tourism, studies of the built and urban environment, conservation, archives and any field of study that deals with the emotional impact and use of the past in the present. There is an increasing interest in how emotion is a form of judgement on things that affect ou...

Involving communities, visitors or the public is frequently presented as one of the major tasks of museums and heritage sites in current global movements toward new collaborative paradigms (Golding and Modest 2013; Watson and Waterton 2011). Co-production is a highly current issue, and a proposed emancipatory solution to the authorized heritage discourse, which seemingly has reached a critical juncture. Scholarship has echoed calls from communities for more direct involvement in the presentat...

Dans un texte majeur, «L’arrêt de monde», Deborah Danowski et Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explorent le thème de la fin du monde tel qu’il se déploie aujourd’hui «dans l’imaginaire de la culture mondialisée». Entre fiction, philosophie et anthropologie, ils déroulent la scène sombre de nos futurs d’espèce humaine devenue force géologique et autodestructrice vivant non plus sur mais dans une planète considérée comme un être vivant et une puissance menaçante (Gaïa). Si le spectre de la catastroph...

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 ...

Among other aims, the Critical Heritage Studies (CHS) Movement, most exemplified by the promotional efforts of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS), seeks to push heritage studies beyond its more traditional, longstanding "borders" of investigating the progress, as well as shortcomings, of the museum and heritage enterprise. Indeed, in the manifesto for ACHS, it is noted that heritage studies ought to expand to include a broader range of disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) the...

To date, there has been much scholarly discussion and critique about how ideas and policies of "heritage" may be operating globally. There have also been ethnographic studies providing "on the ground" perspectives. In this session, we aim to establish a bridge between local-level empirical study and global heritage discourse. By addressing "heritage" in relation to processes of modernization and globalization in East Asia, we seek to investigate the dynamic communication between global herita...

Heritage has multiple, concurrent origins. It is performed and produced by individuals, groups and organizations, or institutions on various scales. It is a transformative process and thus closely connected to the transitional. In heritage, transitionality may be usefully conceptualized under the rubric of the liminal, which at its core anticipates change and transformation, structure-agency relationships, affect, and human experience—all significant issues in recent theoretical debates in th...

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...

L’art contemporain, lorsqu’il est en relation avec le patrimoine culturel, que ce dernier soit bâti ou qu’il mobilise d’autres matériaux ou supports, tend à reconfigurer les rapports de la société à ses patrimoines et à son histoire. Il est ainsi à même d’ajouter, de modifier, de détourner ou même de transformer les valeurs historiennes ou esthétiques communément associées au patrimoine culturel d’une nation, d’une région ou d’un groupe social ou ethnique; y compris d’ailleurs en ce qui conce...

Si la ville moderne occidentale se transforme, sous l'action des aménageurs, en écho à des utopies, des programmes de développement et des intérêts économiques, on néglige trop souvent l'action quotidienne d'habitants et d'acteurs sociaux qui s'approprient les lieux et contribuent à les transformer. Dans cette mutation de la ville, le patrimoine se trouve à la croisée d'enjeux économiques et sociaux singuliers: d'une part il est convoqué par les aménageurs et les acteurs de la gentrification ...

This session proposes a critical and epistemological reflection on sustainable urban heritage conservation. Recent research on the management of urban heritage following its conservation process is characterized by a growing number of studies that aim to provide an overview of how to assess the sustainability of existing practices. This dominant focus of the research has contributed to the development of indicators and approaches to sustainable development in this field. In addition, it has a...

Le concept de patrimoine culturel immatériel (PCI) a fait l’objet de nombreux colloques et publications depuis la promulgation de la Convention pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel immatériel de l’UNESCO en 2003, voire même avant. Toutefois, peu d’entre eux se sont attardés à la question de l’impact réel des systèmes et politiques mis en place pour favoriser le développement des pratiques culturelles transmises de génération en génération comme les arts et l’artisanat traditionnels, les ...

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...

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 ...

The roundtable will explore ideas around the concept of insignificance. That is, how things are judged to be unimportant, not worthy of conservation, meaningless, or without substantive power or influence. We will examine this notion in relation to the history, theory, and practical application of significance as a concept and method in heritage. In short, we will discuss the significance of insignificance. The notion of ‘significance’ is central to heritage conservation in many pa...

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights opened to the public in September 2014. Yet this "first museum solely dedicated to the evolution, celebration and future of human rights," met serious criticism from a variety of stakeholders before it even opened its doors. These stakeholders included Indigenous and Ukrainian communities, anti-poverty activists, feminists, gay rights activists, and disability advocates who questioned some of the museum's key curatorial choices in framing issues of righ...

State dominance in heritage management has been a key area of attention in critical heritage studies. There is now a large body of work discussing how this dominance may result in the prioritization of national perspectives and interests over local ones and contribute to the marginalization of alternative interpretations of heritage by ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants and Indigenous peoples. Conflicts often arise between these groups and state authorities over how to manage heritag...

While historical churches are being abandoned all over the Christian West, more and more places are growing the opposite way: pilgrimage sites are being enlarged and enhanced, whole urban districts are being developed with churches and temples boasting diverse, and often unorthodox, religious practices. Epistemologically linked to heritage, the sacred now seems to follow a path of its own, staging itself in new settings where the “religious heritage” refers mostly to common practices, however...

Extant scholarly literature has been documented on heritage and tourism. However, the strong links between heritage and leisure, a broader concept than tourism, have long been neglected. The notion of heritage has pervaded in a variety of humanities-related fields, among them is leisure, which demonstrates the lived experience of locals, and provides indispensible meanings and identity for communities and individuals. And both heritage and leisure root themselves into cultural fabrics of soci...

What is the future of the UK and what is the role of heritage in this shifting political landscape? How have debates on heritage in the UK changed since the influential critiques of Hewison and Wright in the 1980s? How can those engaged in Critical Heritage Studies in the UK negotiate the difficult relationship between academic critique and sector relevance? How do current debates in the UK relate to and differ from those in Western and non-Western contexts? This workshop will bring ...

This roundtable session engages with the relations between critical heritage studies and the law. From the definition of heritage down to specific safeguarding programs, the law influences heritage management, and heritage studies seems to overlook that influence. It also contributes to articulating connections to cultural identity, and structures around cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue. For the most part, these relationships between heritage studies and heritage law are fraug...

Canada is often pictured as vast territory of wilderness and wide-open spaces. Yet most of Canadian life plays out in interior spaces. These spaces dominate our daily life, frame memories, and can hold the traces of our histories. Interiors are also particularly challenging spaces for traditional heritage policy, as they are notoriously fluid, changing, and ever evolving to meet new needs and desires. Compounding the problem, the ‘designers’ of interiors—interior decorators and interior de...

Since 1914-1918, the dominant image of heritage destruction by acts of war is associated with the exponential expansion of mass violence, most often practised remotely, using weapons of extreme force. From 1939 to 1945, sophisticated weaponry boosted the scale of the industrial war until the total eradication of towns. This resulted in two phenomena that have occupied the affected countries for decades: first, complex restorations on thousands of monuments; secondly, extensive reconstruction ...

The 1970s witnessed a flourishing of living experiments in space, place and community sharing broad ambitions to bring about transformed human social and interpersonal conditions, to re-envision relationships between people and the environment and ecology of their habitats, and to reject a growing mainstream vision of people as passive consumers in favour of a role as creative and adventurous agents of their own destinies. While some expressions of these experiments were non-spatial or intend...

To date, very little literature explicitly explores the relationships of museums and heritage to historical consciousness, despite the overlapping concerns shared by these respective fields. This roundtable addresses the subject of museums as sites of historical consciousness by reflecting on a recent book project. Museums as Sites of Historical Consciousness: Perspectives on Museum Theory and Practice in Canada (working title, UBC Press, 2016) examines (1) ways that museums create and sha...