CFP: 2 Sessions at ACHS (Hangzhou, 1-6 Sep 18)

Session 026: Transgressing Borders in Cultural Heritage Marketing

Session Chairs: Dorit Kluge (Berlin/Germany, dorit.kluge at hwtk.de); Catherine Morgan-Proux (Clermont-Ferrand/France, catherine.morgan-proux at uca.fr)

Heritage marketing is a very young domain even if management of heritage sites has always existed. The first textbook from Misiura (2006) has identified methods of applying the concept of marketing to the wide range of heritage sites and products. A decade later we are confronted to a more complex state of research where differentiated topics are discussed: Marketing theories and media have changed. Traditional marketing has been flanked by customer relationship marketing as well as the analogue by the digital marketing. The approaches of handling heritage (conservation, preservation, utilization) differentiated as well as the frame conditions (political changes, tourism growth).

The session focusses on marketing of cultural heritage, both tangible or intangible. We would like to explore the contact points of heritage and marketing in the past and in the present so that we will be able to construct their future within the concept of sustainability. We invite scholars and practitioners with the intention that theoretical papers, empirical contributions and practical case studies stimulate each other. Papers should propose interdisciplinary research and debates on cultural heritage marketing by merging different points of view, e.g. management, tourism, leisure, hospitality, heritage conservation, architecture, archaeology, art history, etc. Contributions should move beyond classical marketing and examine the challenges arising from changed approaches to cultural heritage. Marketing itself should be conceived as a very large notion on a strategic and on an operative level.

Session 052: Company Towns Beyond Border

Association of Critical Heritage Studies, 4th Biannual Conference
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

Session chairs: Lucie K. Morisset : morisset.lucie at uqam.ca and Jessica Mace : mace.jessica at courrier.uqam.ca

The history and territory of numerous countries are sprinkled with company towns: born of national or multinational companies, they conquered resources and pushed frontiers. Built to accommodate and house the workers of a company, around a mill, mine or factory, they also served to sedentarize the workforce, often by attracting entire families from a distance, and by creating a sense of belonging within these very same communities. In so doing, they often transposed models and ideas from elsewhere, through the experience and mobility of engineers, manufacturers, businessmen, planners and workers from other company towns or industries. With heterogeneous populations and extremely varied provenances, these planned and frontier-conquering industrial cities belong just as much to transnational networks as to the countries in which they stimulated development.

If this cross-border identity itself, throughout history, has contributed to the creation of stronger internal social links within the communities of company towns, it does not represent any less of a challenge with respect to the conservation and transmission of heritage. In fact, as a number of authors linked to current critical heritage studies have shown, the notion, politics and practices of monumental heritage are traditionally constituted according to a national heritage and orchestrated by the state or regional authorities under homogeneous criteria on the scale of the territory: diversity, minorities and cross-border issues remain epiphenomena. In a certain way, the heritage of company towns corresponds more precisely with the notion and uses of world heritage than those of recognized world heritage itself. Just as they reinvented the production of territory, company towns also question our heritage conceptions and practices, because they are not just the territory that they occupy, because their memory is not just of their own country, but also because they exceed the borders of our habits.

This session seeks to examine the ways in which company towns have taught us and continue to teach us to reinvent the borders of identity and of heritage. We are particularly looking for presentations that use the example of a company town or a corpus of company towns anywhere in the world, that question the cross-border circulation of models, ideas or people that engendered a specific identity, and/or the ways in which this territorial distinction questions the creation of heritage today, in generating (or not) renewed practices and conceptions of heritage.

Your abstract should be submitted by Thursday, November 30, 2017, in the following format.
(Please note that abstracts that do not adhere to the format will be rejected).

  •  Name
  •  Email address
  •  Place of employment/study
  •  A brief resume (biographical notice and main publications or achievements) of no more than 300 words
  •  Type of proposal: Paper proposal for a standard 20-minute paper
  •  The number and title of the session: 052 Company Towns Beyond Borders
  •  Title of your paper
  •  An abstract of no more than 500 words. Abstracts should present the topic or main argument and demonstrate scientific quality through references to a theoretical framework, a methodology or by outlining the contribution to knowledge.

Submissions can be made either in English or Chinese.