Facilitation and mentoring are the key tasks for the leadership. We want to make room for new collaborations and ways of exploring and support cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary research.
We are especially focused on drawing groups of people into the debate who are not normally part of these kinds of conversations and reaching beyond the usual kinds of publics that the university as institutions reaches. For the first year of the programme on Decolonial Futures, we’ll be collaborating with the Greenlandic House in Aarhus and with Rum46, a volunteer-run art space in the city. We will also integrate the Master students in the programme on Sustainable Heritage Management and the PhD students in our departments into the activities and planning of the research programme.
One of the most powerful things that we do as university-based academics is to train the next generation of heritage managers and policy makers, with direct impacts on society as a whole. Aarhus University’s Masters programme on Sustainable Heritage Management is widely recognized as a globally leading programme and was the first programme in Europe to specifically introduce sustainability as a key component of heritage management—a move which has since been copied by other Masters programmes elsewhere.
Supporting targeted workshops for research development.
Seeding research initiatives that can enhance the wider research environment at CAS in terms of influence (research outreach, impact and significance), and capacity (in terms of both the quantity and quality of scholarship).
We see the research programme as an opportunity to reflect on the future of heritage management in Denmark and globally, in the face of an emergent set of challenges including climate change, endemic conflict and war, the effects of growing social and economic inequality, the effects of new technologies, and so on. We need to reflect on these challenges and come up with effective ways of addressing them, both at the level of research and teaching.
The students that we teach now will be economically active 40 and 50 years into the future, a frightening thought when we think about how rapidly things are changing. We need as a matter of urgency to devise curricula that best prepare our students for the enormous challenges that they are likely to face in these future worlds.
Sticking with ‘business as usual’ approaches is simply not enough—we need to understand that we live in a moment of crisis and we need to respond accordingly. Preparing for the future means understanding and engaging with the rest of the world. One of the enormous strengths of the Masters programme in Sustainable Heritage Management is that it allows Danish students to meet and interact with students from all over the world, and get an insight into their perspectives and experiences. The effect is transformative. As educators we need to think seriously about how we produce these kinds of transformative effects.
