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Rethinking Heritage in the Anthropocene
2 February 2022
Rodney Harrison (UCL Institute of Archaeology) has been invited to give the 5th Annual Heritage Lecture hosted by the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre on 24 February.
The Cambridge Heritage Research Centre (CHRC) brings together Departments and Faculties from a variety of disciplines across the University of Cambridge to address a range of important themes within heritage research.The Annual Heritage Lecture is a free public lecture and all are welcome to attend.
Rodney's lecture will take place on Zoom at 5pm on Tuesday 24 February (UK GMT). Details of how to register are available here.
Abstract
The last few decades have witnessed the declaration of a series of interlinked ecological and cultural crises-of climate, history, race, and biological and cultural diversity-which have had and continue to have a fundamental impact on the planet and its human and non-human occupants alike. Accordingly, this talk draws on a number of recent international collaborative research projects which aim to address the role of heritage and heritage studies in the Anthropocene. These projects have been characterised by collaborative partnerships with heritage sector organisations and other actors which have sought to intervene not only critically, but also practically in the role of natural and cultural heritage preservation within the climate, extinction and race crises. They have done so by engaging organisations and publics as co-researchers in the research process and in aiming to rethink the conscious practical role of heritage in building distinctive future worlds.
Rodney's work has been central to the establishment of critical heritage studies as a topic of research and teaching. From 2017-2021 he was AHRC Heritage Priority Area Leadership Fellow, from 2015-2019 he was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Heritage Futures research programme, and from 2016-2021 he led the Work Package on 'Theorizing heritage futures in Europe: heritage scenarios' as part of the European Commission funded Marie Sklodowska-Curie action [MSCA] Doctoral Training Network CHEurope: Critical Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe.
His most recent books, all co-authored/edited and available in open access, include Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices (UCL Press, 2020), Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2020) and Reimagining Museums for Climate Action (Museums for Climate Action, 2021).