Close
An ethnography of restitution
30 April 2025, 5:00 pm–6:00 pm
Join us for a virtual guest lecture with Charlotte Joy, lecturer in cultural heritage management in the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage
About the talk
The frameworks underpinning the decision of whether to restitute objects from museums to claimants involves the complex interaction of siloed regimes of value and authority acting across academic and political landscapes. These different understandings of what is at stake when a restitution claim is made are regulated by professionals who have been trained to understand their worldview as the primary or ‘natural’ lens through which to make decisions. Additionally, an insistence on restitution claims being approached on a ‘case by case’ basis ignores the wider powerful regulating normative assumptions underlying decisions and the inherent asymmetries in approaches that are presented as neutral, such as provenance research, stakeholder mapping, legal regimes, valuations, or conservation reports. In this talk Charlotte Joy will discuss the research for her new book, drawing on interviews and her work with UNESCO.
About the event
This is virtual lecture taking place on Zoom. The talk will be followed by a Q&A where participants can write and upvote questions to the speaker.
About the Speaker
Charlotte Joy
Lecturer in cultural heritage management at University of Southampton
Charlotte Joy is a lecturer in cultural heritage management in the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton. She is a non-executive Director for Culture at the UK UNESCO National Commission and advises the UK Government on UNESCO's Cultural Conventions. She is a trained facilitator of the 2003 UNESCO ICH Convention and is currently working on the implementation of the convention in the UK. She is the author of two books, 'The Politics of Heritage Management in Mali' (Routledge, 2012) and 'Heritage Justice' (CUP, 2020)
More about Charlotte Joy