New publication – outcome from EU financed research school CHEurope
The book addresses European heritage realities and futures through new voices, paradigms, and methods.
CHEurope was a PhD training program in cultural heritage supported by the European Union under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions (MSCA) – Innovative Training Networks (ITN). The project is the result of a collaboration between key European academic and non-academic organisations in Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Italy. The project supported the research and training of 15 Early Stage Researchers from Europe and other parts of the world. The CHEurope projects was lead by Professor Kristian Kristiansen, University of Gothenburg.
CHEurope aimed at developing a new integrated framework to enhance the academic and professional training and open future job opportunities in cultural heritage preservation, management and promotion.
The CHEurope book Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe, edited by Rodney Harrison, Nélia Dias, and Kristian Kristiansen, is one of the results of the project.
The book is published online on the UCL Press website and available to download for free via open access.
About the book
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.
“This project and its final outcome in the book was inspired by the ideas and research themes in the CCHS, and therefore also the final conference resulting in the book was held at the University of Gothenburg”, says Kristian Kristiansen, PI CHEurope and one of the editors of the book.
Read more about the CHEurope project via: http://cheurope-project.eu/
The book is available via UCL Press: https://uclpress.co.uk/CriticalHeritage
For connected departments at the University of Gothenburg, see below.
