As rising inequalities, systemic racism, and climate change oppress marginalized groups across the globe, heritage regimes serve to maintain and create uneven power relations. The politics of heritage, however, are more than a ubiquitous dispositive of domination. The ways people understand, experience, and fabricate the past(s) can also empower marginalized subjects to resist oppression. The Heritage Justice Series will explore these dynamics by bringing together scholars who investigate questions of power in heritage making. Four seminars will prompt interrogations of heritage through intersecting lens of race, decolonization, urban politics, as well as trauma and conflict.  Please send an email to [email protected] enclosing an abstract (200 words) with title and author’s affiliation by March 1st, 2021. Please indicate the session title you are addressing.

1) Race & Heritage: Scholars who apply, extend, or develop critical heritage studies theory and analysis by examining race and ethnicity within local, national, international, and transnational contexts are invited to submit abstracts for this session. This track will explore contemporary and historical conceptions of race and ethnicity. We seek presentations examining how these notions intersect with various political, cultural, and social contexts that have engendered divisions, inequities, violence, dispossessions and/or alternate ways of relating and becoming. 

2) Decolonizing Heritage: The embedded logics of modernity and epistemic violence in the Western thought have influenced the outlines and ways we think, sense and discuss heritage, reproducing dynamics of accumulation, separation, oppression, linearity, extraction and more. Within the frame of heritage justice, “Decolonising Heritage” is an invitation for papers that defy, unsettle, undo, delink, contest, rethink or disobey colonial ideologies embedded in heritage making and practice, encouraging critical approaches and new directions. We are open to proposals that expand the ways we sense, believe, do, live and interact with heritage as we aim to transform colonial structures and empower marginalised communities.

 3) Heritage and the Urban: Spaces of Power and Insurgency: The form and appearance of “historic” built environments intensify the marginalization of oppressed groups in cities around the world: powerful actors promote policies and design projects that spatialize exclusion in a range of dimensions. The bodies and practices that do not adhere to authorised visions of history are banished as illegitimate “others.” Yet, if the production of historic landscapes can facilitate exclusion, it can also enable insurgency. Exploring how heritage impacts the production of space, this panel reflects on how hegemonic interpretations of history amplify inequalities, and how deprived groups in turn appropriate, re-signify, and transform heritage to fight injustice.

4) Trauma, Conflict and Heritages: Conflict and trauma are interrelated phenomena that occur on multiple scales and impact heritage in different ways. While we have seen the generative and destructive consequences of conflict on heritage and the ‘memory’ of affected communities, we have also witnessed the weaponization of heritage itself and the destruction of heritage sites as a result of climate change and natural disasters. Regardless of the precise mechanism of destruction, heritage in the wake of conflict becomes a vessel of memories, emotions, and expectations. Therefore, this seminar seeks to gather diverse perspectives on the relationship between memory, violence, trauma and heritage.