Keynote Address:
Baroness Andrews, English Heritage
Speakers Include: Professor Christina Cameron, University of Montreal; Marie-Noël Tournoux, UNESCO World Heritage Centre; James Rebanks, Rebanks Consulting Ltd; Adam Wilkinson, Edinburgh World Heritage; Feng Jing, UNESCO World Heritage Centre and Kate Roberts, Cadw
Since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention in 1972, the perception of what constitutes ‘heritage’ has undergone dramatic change, including a widening of the definition to include both the ‘great’ and the ‘ordinary’, tangible and intangible forms of heritage, and even cultural diversity itself. The Convention has been central to debates which have transformed our understanding of what heritage is and does in contemporary global societies.
This one day conference is jointly organised by ICOMOS-UK, The Open University, UCL Centre for Museums, Heritage and Material Culture and the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. It marks the 40th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention by looking to the future of World Heritage in the UK and beyond. The conference brings together government representatives, policy makers, academics, heritage site managers and interested members of the public to discuss the role of World Heritage in the UK in the coming decades in relation to the following series of questions:
This one-day international conference will reflect on how the UK might contribute to broader international debates on sustainability and the evolving role of World Heritage in the future.
£60 ICOMOS-UK members, £65 non-members (includes lunch, tea and coffee)
The full event programme including list of speakers and discussion topics is available to download from ICOMOS-UK, with booking and on-line payment:
http://www.icomos-uk.org/about-us/events/whtc/
ICOMOS-UK is the UK National Committee of ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites). At an international level, ICOMOS develops best practice in the conservation and management of cultural sites, and has a special role as adviser to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee on cultural World Heritage sites. Active in over 130 countries, it is one of the most highly regarded conservation organisations in the world.
Download the conference information in PDF format.
Library Presentation Room (ground floor)
10.00-15.30
Coffee/tea will be available at the start, and at lunchtime. Participants are asked to bring their own lunches, please.
Introductions and welcome
Rodney Harrison ‘World heritage, universal values and the politics of representation: an alternative view’
Louise Cooke ‘Emerging debates: Human rights and earthen architectural heritage’
Lotte Hughes ‘The implications of Kenya’s new constitution for cultural heritage-related claims, and increased tensions between human and cultural rights’
Graham Harvey ‘Respecting indigenous animate object-persons’
Monica Grady (or Diane Johnson) ‘Meteorites in Cultural Heritage’
Questions
Discussion, led by Paul Tremlett, and further questions
Follow this link to read presentation abstracts.
Download the programme and abstracts as a PDF file [29 KB].
Contact: Please address any enquiries to the organiser, Lotte Hughes l.hughes@open.ac.uk or lotilda@hotmail.com
Rodney Harrison co-chaired the Advanced Seminar 'Reassembling the Collection: Indigenous Agency and Ethnographic Objects' at the School for Advanced Reseach in Santa Fe in September 2010. The seminar brought together scholars from the US, UK and Australia to discuss issues relating to the colonial origins of collections of Indigenous material culture held in museum collections and their ongoing relevence in the contemporary world. More information is available online.
| Welcome: Rodney Harrison, Heritage Studies, Faculty of Arts |
| Guest Speaker: Evelyne Godfrey, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. “Defining Early Metalworking Technology Without Cutting Samples” |
| Maria Nita, Religious Studies, Faculty of Arts. “The Planet as Heritage: Planet Earth in Ecological and Religious Discourse” |
| John Zarnecki, Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Science. “Extra-Planetary Heritage” |
| Stephen Little, Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Enterprise, The Open University Business School. “Narrative and Nostalgia: CERN’s Presentation of the ATLAS Detector” |
| Paul Hatherly, Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Science. “Physical Science and Interpretation in Archaeology – A Case Study” |
| Lunch |
| Workshop Session (Chair, Paul Hatherly) |
| Jovan Byford, Faculty of Social Sciences, “Memorial geography of the Holocaust in Serbia: the case of the Semlin Judenlager” |
| Laura Allen, Faculty of Arts, “Academic and museum interpretations of police history” |
| Allan Jones, Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology, “BBC science’s ‘recurrent problem’; external interference from the 20s to the 60s” |
| Sue M. Davies, Open University Business School, “Are we all curators now? The involvement of external parties in the creation of museum exhibitions” |
| Fernando Dominguez Rubio, Faculty of Social Sciences, “The contentious case of contemporary art” |
| Lotte Hughes, Faculty of Arts (Ferguson Centre and History Department), “Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers: The struggle for a Kenyan sacred forest” |
| Jill Gibbon, Associate Lecturer, “Unofficial war art: war, heritage and protest” |
| Lunch (please bring your own) |
| Workshop: Heritage and the ‘problem’ of memory Chaired by Rodney Harrison, Faculty of Arts |
The emergence of memory as a crucial concern in both Western and non-Western societies is one of the key cultural and political phenomena of late twentieth century modernity (Huyssen 2000: 57). Memory discourses first emerged in the West in the 1960s in response to the rise of new social movements, decolonisation and, after 1980, mobilised debates around the testimonial movement and ‘remembering’ the Holocaust. Richard Terdiman (1993) noted modernity’s ‘memory crisis’, while scholars such as Richard Werbner (1998) have examined this crisis in relation to postcolonial Africa and the problematical state uses of ‘memory’ in nation-building. Kammen (1995) situates the roots of the post 1945 heritage movement in the development of a modern sense of nostalgia and an obsession with preservation, the forcible act of not forgetting (or more accurately, remembering). This obsession with preservation has led to the development of many formal controls for the classification, listing, and conservation of an ever widening portfolio of objects, buildings, landscapes, and even practices. It is widely acknowledged that heritage has very little to do with the past, and much more to do with the present and how we imagine our future. And yet there has, to date, been little discussion of mechanisms by which we can remove early listings from the heritage portfolio once they become irrelevant to the societies who listed them, or indeed, whether an item of World Heritage, for example, might be eligible for de-accessioning. For this reason, the growth of what constitutes heritage seems unstoppable. What happens when we are constantly surrounded by the memories of the past, or memorials to past regimes which we would rather forget? What are some of the formal problems which heritage legislation poses for the natural process of collective forgetting? What are the mechanisms for de-accessioning, and how do they relate to memory? Can we use heritage to forget?
Please contact Rodney Harrison (r.harrison@open.ac.uk) for further details about the interfaculty heritage studies research group.
Issues of identity have been central to debates concerning heritage since the emergence of heritage studies in the 1980s. Identities are often articulated around the objects, artefacts, places and landscapes reflexively organised as heritage. Whilst biographical narratives and the traces of personal and collective memory key to the expression of identity are increasingly subject to formalisation in museums, visitor attractions and interpretation strategies concerned with everyday experience. From the architectures, literatures, museums and education policies which give official sanction to particular formulations of national identity to the symbols, stories and localised practices shaping identification within specific groups and communities, heritage plays an important part giving physical and embodied form to even the most nebulous identifications and unformulated senses of belonging. The globalisation of economic and social circulations has put in question many apparently solid conceptions of identity whilst mobilising many of these as heritage commodities in and of themselves. In this context, the writing of history, construction of museums, assembly of collections, identification and management of historic sites play an increasingly important role in the politics of identity.
Exploring the complex relationships between heritage and identity, this workshop seeks contributions in the following and related areas:
The aim for the workshop is to have a series of presentations in the morning, including an invited external keynote speaker. In the afternoon we will be organising a series of discussions around research funding in heritage. We have already started to look at collaborative bids for funding over the past few months and are looking to build on that. Please let us know if you would be interested in any parallel sessions on any of the following:
We will be joined in the morning by Helen Weinstein, Director, Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP), University of York, who will speak about her recent work on diversifying communities in heritage.
10:15 Tea and Coffee
10: 25 Welcome and Introduction (George Revill, Kevin Hetherington and Rodney Harrison)
10. 30 – 11.00 Helen Weinstein (Director, Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP), University of York), ‘Diversifying audiences across London museums, galleries, libraries and archives’.
11.00 - 11.30 Rodney Harrison (Faculty of Arts) – ‘Parallel histories? Indigenous identity issues and the development of a critical heritage studies’
11.30 – 12.00 George Revill (Faculty of Social Sciences) – ‘Railway heritage: identity and the aesthetic of the second machine age’
12.00 – 12.30 Dan Weinbren (Faculty of Social Sciences) – ‘Living the heritage of fraternity’
12.30 – 13.00 Maria Nita (Faculty of Arts) – ‘Heritage and Collective Identity inside the Climate Movement’
13:00-14:00 Lunch (Sandwich lunch provided)
14:00-16:00 Discussion Forum: Research Funding in Heritage
Please send other enquiries to George Revill g.revill@open.ac.uk and any further ideas for the afternoon session to Kevin Hetherington k.i.hetherington@open.ac.uk.
