Foregrounding lived experience and relationships in museums for participatory heritage-making

UCL Institute of Archaeology Thematic Research Seminars Programme | Term II, 2025-26

The Term II seminar series will highlight thematic research looking at 'Computational and Digital Frontiers' and 'Community-Led Pasts and Futures'. These are scheduled to be in-person events.

Seminars on 'Computational and Digital Frontiers' will explore research related to applications of data science; advanced landscape GIS; modern spatial and multivariate statistic; remote-sensing and geophysical prospection; agent-based modelling; human use of space as well as data infrastructure.

Those seminars on 'Community-Led Pasts and Futures' will highlight research related to theory and practice of community and development archaeology; heritage and wellbeing; archives and ethics; cultural heritage of diaspora communities; memorialising ancient landscapes; issues of science capital and identity with under-represented audiences; community-collaborative research exploring museums, decolonisation, and social justice as well as co-production of research with diverse stakeholders and publics.

About the speaker

Harald Fredheim is Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of York. He studied objects conservation at UCL before completing a PhD in York on participatory approaches to caring for heritage places. His current work is centred around participatory practices in museums, both in-person and online. He has also worked on research projects exploring creative approaches to heritage documentation, contemporary collecting and disposal in museums, how to care for heritage buildings in landscapes undergoing unavoidable change and how to understand and evaluate public benefit from development-led archaeology.

Wednesdays, 4pm

• 21 January: CAAL Project team - Central Asian Archaeological Urbanscapes: digital documentation, interpretation and monitoring
• 28 January: Pontus Skoglund (The Crick Institute) - Myth, materiality, and migration? - insights into the genetic histories of Britain, Scandinavia, and Egypt from ancient DNA
• 4 February: Xana Barroso (University of Southampton) - Measuring minds: exploring behaviour and information transmission in Middle Palaeolithic handaxes through Geometric Morphometrics
• 11 February: Francesco Carrer (Newcastle University) - Ethnoarchaeology and computer modelling to investigate long-term landscape dynamics

[18 February: Reading Week - no seminar]

• 25 February: Sarah Wolferstan (UCL ASE) - What tools are we using? ASE's approach to engagement and our Whitechapel project
• 4 March: Francesco Ripanti (University of Birmingham) - Roots and Routes: A View of Community-Led Archaeology from the Mediterranean
• 11 March: Harald Fredheim (University of York) - Foregrounding lived experience and relationships in museums for participatory heritage-making. This event will take place in Room 609.
• 18 March: Paola Giuseppantonio Di Franco (University of Essex) - Reimagining Place After Disaster: Community Voices, Immersive Technologies, and the Reconstruction of Belonging

All members of the UCL community are welcome to attend.