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Call for Papers for Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene Symposium
24 May 2022
The Bartlett and partners invite submissions for a global symposium in October 2022, aimed at decolonising, decentring and reframing the recent past to achieve equitable and sustainable futures.
Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene is part of the MoHoA global collaborative, taking place 26–28 October 2022, and builds on the Modern Heritage of Africa symposium hosted by the University of Cape Town in September 2021. Coordinated by The Bartlett’s Professor Edward Denison and Head of the University of Liverpool’s School of Architecture, Professor Ola Uduku, along with partners at the University of Cape Town, the Africa World Heritage Fund and around the world, this upcoming hybrid symposium responds to an age of planetary crisis in which a precarious present reflects an inequitable past and a perilous future.
Modern heritage in all its forms and from around the world is the subject of this multidisciplinary symposium, presenting the paradox of being of modernity and yet threatened by its consequences. MoHoA was originally conceived within an African context to interrogate this paradox because the continent encapsulates the historical inequities that characterise the modern and its associated notions of development and progress while also facing the highest rates of urbanisation over the next 30 years, demanding new approaches to the past and present that achieve equitable and sustainable futures on a planetary scale. The outcomes of the two symposia will synthesise in the recognition of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage.
Call for papers
Submissions are invited from researchers, academics, and practitioners. The organisers are seeking papers or equivalent submissions that critically engage with reframing, re-evaluating, decentring, and decolonising recent, hidden or marginalised pasts in pursuit of achieving more equitable, just, and sustainable futures. Participants will contribute to the completion of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, supporting policy change at a global level through our partner UNESCO.
Topics can include, but are not limited to:
- Practices of coloniality, decentring and decolonising history and historiography
- Considerations and conceptualisations of multiple modernities
- Modern heritage and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
- Planetary futures and the Anthropocene
- Infrastructure and (post)-industrial heritage
- Combining culture and nature, and the role of natural heritage in society
- Challenging binaries (rural/urban, modern/traditional, nature/culture, tangible/intangible, racial/non-racial etc)
- Public space and memory: memorialisation, commemoration and remembering
- Modern heritage and the World Heritage Convention
How to submit
Submissions should be in English or French and should be emailed to mohoa@ucl.ac.uk by 24 June 2022.
Notification of acceptance will be provided by 22 July. Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words or equivalent format (e.g. film shorts, blog, or Instagram story) for other types of digital submissions.
Selected papers or presentations will be published as part of the MoHoA Book Series after the conference and selected extended papers will appear in a special edition of the journal ‘Curator’.
More information
Image: The international railway settlement of Fushun (northeast China), with its modern town planning and the Ryuho Colliery, built by Denang and Siemens, and home to one of the world’s largest open cast mines in the 1930s.