Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe

Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe

Edited by Rodney Harrison, Nélia Dias, and Kristian Kristiansen

Cultural and natural heritage are central to ‘Europe’ and ‘the European project’. They were bound up in the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where they were used to justify differences over which border conflicts were fought. Later, the idea of a ‘common European heritage’ provided a rationale for the development of the European Union. Now, the emergence of ‘new’ populist nationalisms shows how the imagined past continues to play a role in cultural and social governance, while a series of interlinked social and ecological crises are changing the ways that heritage operates. New discourses and ontologies are emerging to reconfigure heritage for the circumstances of the present and the uncertainties of the future.

Taking the current role of heritage in Europe as its starting point, Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe presents a number of case studies that explore key themes in this transformation. Contributors draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives to consider, variously, the role of heritage and museums in the migration and climate ‘emergencies’; approaches to urban heritage conservation and practices of curating cities; digital and digitised heritage; the use of heritage as a therapeutic resource; and critical approaches to heritage and its management. Taken together, the chapters explore the multiple ontologies through which cultural and natural heritage have actively intervened in redrawing the futures of Europe and the world.

Format: Open Access PDF

387 Pages

51 colour illustrations and 6 B&W illustrations

ISBN: 9781800083936

Publication: October 24, 2023

List of figures
List of tables
Contributors
Preface and acknowledgements

Introduction
Rodney Harrison Nélia Dias, and Kristian Kristiansen*

Part I: Heritage and global challenges

Editors’ introduction to Part 1

1 Rethinking museums for the climate emergency
Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling

2 From climate victim to climate action: heritage as agent in climate change mitigation discourse
Janna oud Ammerveld

3 Syrian refugees' food in Lisbon: a heritage of food beyond national borders
Marcela Jaramillo

4 Relations with objects: a longitudinal case study
Katie O’Donoghue

Part II: Curating the city: rethinking urban heritages

Editors’ introduction to Part 2

5 Erosion and preservation of the cultural and geological heritage in mega city landscapes of the Global South: A geo-aesthetic inquiry
Peter Krieger

6 Recognising urban heritage written in water: Mapping fluctuating articulations in time and space
Moniek Driesse

7 Participatory design in the context of heritage-development: Engaging with the past in the design space of historical landscapes
Mela Zuljevic

8 The (over)touristification of European historic cities: a relation between urban heritage and short-term rental market demand
Łukasz Bugalski

9 Overtourism vs pandemic: the fragility of our historic cities
Maria Pia Guermandi

Part III: Digital heritages and digital futures

10 Datafied landscapes: Exploring digital maps as (critical) heritage
Stuart Dunn

11 #Womenof1916 and the heritage of the Easter Rising on Twitter
Hannah K. Smyth

12 The material and immaterial historic environment
William Illsley

13 Digitality as a cultural policy instrument: Europeana and the Europeanisation of digital heritage
Carlotta Capurro

14 De-neutralising digital heritage infrastructures? Critical considerations on digital engagements with the past in the context of Europe
Gertjan Plets, Julianne Nyhan, Andrew Flinn, Alexandra Ortolja-Baird and Jaap Verheul

Part IV: Postcolonial legacies: ‘European’ heritages beyond Europe

Editors’ introduction to Part 4

15 Heritage pharmacology and ‘moving heritage’: Making refugees, asylum seekers and Palestine part of the European conscience
Beverley Butler and Fatima Al-Nammari

16 How to tell the good guys from the bad guys…or not
Randall H McGuire

17 Traumatic heritage, politics of visibility and the standardisation of plaques and memorials in the city of São Paulo, Brazil
Márcia Lika Hattori

18 Lampedusa here and there: activating memories of migration in Amsterdam’s historic centre – a resource for whom?
Vittoria Caradonna

Concluding reflections

Afterword
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett