Understanding Global Heritage engages with debates about what should be preserved as heritage, the form in which heritage should be conserved and how it should be presented to the public. These debates are not limited to the tangible traces of objects and places but extend to the intangible heritage of social practices and collective memory. The course asks you to question the unwritten suggestion within most contemporary western societies that heritage is necessarily ‘good’, and to uncover the ways in which heritage embodies relationships of power and subjugation, inclusion and exclusion, remembering and forgetting. It also asks you to consider who is represented by heritage, and who heritage has neglected to mention.
You will study aspects of heritage from a number of different countries including the UK, USA, Australia, Thailand, South Africa, India, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Italy, Spain, Afghanistan, Norway, Alaska, Greece, Italy, Russia, South America, Malaysia and Singapore. Global heritage studies integrate a rich diversity of academic disciplines and perspectives. Making sense of heritage requires a knowledge and critical understanding of the manner in which professionals and other stakeholders make judgements about heritage and the underlying value systems on which these judgements are based. Understanding Global Heritage will enable you to interrogate a range of issues, questions and problems in global heritage studies, including the connection between heritage and nationalism, the duality of heritage as a ‘process’ as well as a ‘product’, and the use of both tangible and intangible heritage to facilitate collective and individual remembering and forgetting. You will learn about changing approaches to heritage and conservation in western and non-western societies from the eighteenth to early twenty-first centuries, focusing particularly on the global implications of the 1972 World Heritage Convention. The course also looks to the future and asks ‘What does heritage do?’ and ‘Who is heritage for?’ – offering an opportunity for you to engage with heritage studies simultaneously as an area of academic enquiry, cultural meaning and practical application.
