Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe

Julianne Nyhan, Andrew Flinn and Hannah Smyth of DIS were on the project and included in the book, published by UCL press.

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.

Rodney Harrison is Professor of Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.
Nélia Dias is Associate Professor at the University Institute of Lisbon, Centre for Research in
Anthropology
Kristian Kristiansen is Professor of Archaeology at University of Gothenburg, and affiliated
professor at Copenhagen University.

October 2023
386 pages, 234 x 156mm
Open Access PDF
Available free from www.uclpress.co.uk/CriticalHeritage
Paperback £30.00 9781800083943
Hardback £45.00 9781800083950

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