New research programme explores how heritage can shape the present and future

What key research questions and issues bring together the programme's research?

We are interested in how heritage can shape the present and future. Mostly people think of heritage as something that ‘has been’, something in the past, but heritage is produced in the present and shapes the future. Heritage is constructed through complex meetings between people, species and the materialities and is thus a possible venue to think about past and future challenges. 

Through heritage we look the multiple, overlapping crises of the present and how heritages practices can approach problems and present solutions. One of the debates that we want to engage is the emerging conversation around Heritage-based Solutions (HbS) to global challenges, like the climate emergency and social and economic inequality. For us, heritage is an important route towards social justice, hence the theme for the first year of the research programme is ‘Decolonial Futures’ in which we engage with difficult and contested questions of coloniality and its shaping effects in Denmark and more broadly.

Which perspectives and approaches characterise the programme’s research?

Heritage research evolves in a field in between traditional research disciplines of archaeology, history, geography, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, architecure etc. The first year we focus on decolonialization and use this concept to investigate embedded and naturalized perceptions of power, relations and values as they are expressed and materialised in the production, use and experience of heritage. 
In the second year we will explore the subject of utopia/dystopia.

We want to explore alternative ways of working. One of the methods is walking seminars, where meetings take place in heritage settings and institutions. Walking together opens ways of experiencing and investigating that combine theory and practice. We’ll be trying out other non-standard formats: artists’ and curators’ walkabouts, site visits and so on.

How does research contribute to society?

Heritage has been increasingly important in political, social, economic debates. It is used in a variety of arguments on who we are, how to create an equal society and how to create economic growth. In this way, it is also a highly contested ground for power relations, exploitation and oppression. The emerging debate around Heritage-based Solutions understands heritage as a ‘solutions archive’ that we can draw on to address contemporary challenges. We are an ingenious species, and we have faced many challenges in the past, including the challenge of rapidly transforming climatic conditions.

Heritage becomes one of the ways in which we pass on innovations and new technologies to the future. These innovations take the form of technological innovations, forms of landscape management, subsistence strategies, as well as value systems, forms of cooperation, systems of ideas, and so on. Many people argue that the contemporary historical moment constitutes a kind of inflection point or ‘hinge’—a moment of crisis, characterized by multiple, overlapping crises. In this moment of crisis, it makes sense to draw on the archive of heritage to find solutions and inspiration.