Critical Heritage Studies

Cultural history tends to elude positive definition. It deals in some sense with culture, and with history, combined in a creative and often critical analysis. But its strength and analytical potential is to be found in its slipperiness, in its critical attitude to authoritative categorization, and its relentless movement towards new angles, new spaces beyond the evident and the canonical.

This volume has sprung out of the Research School for Studies in Cultural History at the Faculty of Humanities of Stockholm University, a five-year interdisciplinary research programme focusing on interplays between past and present. The Research School has provided a productive space for border-crossing academic enterprises. And as a result, the seventeen essays of this volume display just as many innovative approaches to traditional academic subjects such as celebrity, literary genre, prehistoric remains, television, and historic monuments. All stem from unexpected combinations and sliding perspectives, focusing on obscure corners and gaps between the illuminated centres of traditional academic knowledge. From such sliding perspectives follows the realization that all narratives, representations, and claims of culture and history are in some sense political.

The seventeen essays in this volume demonstrate how a shifting kaleidoscope of the academic subjects makes new knowledge possible, and enables the formulation of new critical questions. Challenging, disturbing, inspirational, these essays all make cultural history.

Epic accounts of polar explorations have dominated the narratives of Antarctica’s past and contributed to a prevailing image of distant wilderness untouched by humans. Archaeological studies have been undertaken from different theoretical and practical perspectives that have helped to either question or reinforce the dominant narratives of Antarctic history. Archaeology began in the late 1970s, focusing on conserving the huts left behind by the expeditions of the Heroic Era of Antarctic Exploration. Since the 1980s archaeological research in the South Shetland Islands region has been focused on diverse topics, including sealing/whaling expeditions. This study presents a historical overview of archaeological work in Antarctica through a chronological approach that describes previous research conducted at the sites of polar expeditions. It also discusses how archaeological practices have contributed to the complex heritage-making process in Antarctica.

Archaeological research focused on nineteenth-century sealers-whalers occupation in the South Shetland Islands has been developed for the last three decades, and the conservation and management of archaeological sites has become a matter of concern for the scientific teams involved. To date more than 30 of these sites have been found and marked along the coasts of the Islands. Some of these have been excavated and studied in more detail providing information about not only sealer’s everyday experiences in land but also the relationship of sealing and whaling to global capitalism expansion. 
Sealing activities were present in the South Shetland Islands since their discovery during the entire nineteenth century. They contributed to the incorporation of uncharted Antarctic places, and the experiences of the groups of sealers left on shore for their duties were the first of their kind in Antarctica. The significance of those expeditions has low visibility in Antarctic Narratives. The nineteenth century material remains of these sealers represent a unique source of evidence for the study of the early stage of human exploration and occupation of Antarctica. Site conservation has not yet been undertaken in the context of the Antarctic Treaty System.
One of the main goals of this paper is to show the analytical power that material culture studies have for understanding the sealers presence in the history of Antarctica. This paper poses the general question: What has the study of material things meant to our knowledge about the historical sealing industry in Antarctica? As a starting point, sealers presence in Antarctica is understood in the particular historical context of the expansion of the modern capitalist world. The sealers presence in the islands represents the process of exploration and of incorporation of an unknown and remote place. From this perspective, I am interested in learning about the particularities of this process by posing specific questions that help characterize the strategies used by sealers in the South Shetland Islands during the nineteenth century.
This paper presents a summary and meta-analysis of data produced during three decades of archaeological research on the topic, addressing specific questions regarding the decisions involved in the use of space, the selection of economic activities developed, the organization of the activities ashore, and possible temporal changes in these choices. More specifically, this paper examines whether the sealer strategies were expansive or focalized in terms of use of space, opportunistic or specialized in terms of resources exploited, flexible or rigid in terms of organization, and to what degree they changed along time during the nineteenth century. Data to answer these questions was gathered through a deep review of all the information about sealers sites in the South Shetland Islands published so far, including publications from our own team as well as other groups.

Call for Chapters for the edited volume: "Cultural Heritage Ecosystems in the MENA Region: Actors, Networks and Agendas" - Submission of abstracts by 30 October 2020.

The Middle East, North Africa and Arab Gulf (MENA) regions have seen significant transformations and reconfigurations within their cultural heritage landscapes in recent years. Academic heritage studies to-date have primarily focused on contemporary large-scale state-led trends and developments. We are calling for chapter proposals that consider the wider cultural ecosystems in the MENA region, which have remained marginalised within academic debates. We are particularly interested in case studies that examine the role of actors such as non-profit, non-governmental institutions, scholarly organisations, individual experts, small business initiatives and consultants. The principal aim of the edited volume is to understand the internal yet globally connected dynamics in the cultural heritage landscape in the MENA region by examining the interrelations, networks, collaborations and competing or conflicting agendas of various local, regional and globally connected stakeholders. We therefore seek chapter proposals that critically examine how various actors are engaged in shaping and re-shaping heritage agendas, networks and institutionalised practices and processes beyond those that are officially sanctioned by the state. How do non-state and grassroots initiatives generate and shape alternative heritage futures in the MENA region? How are current and future heritage concerns – such as the preservation of endangered heritage, the cultural heritage of migrant workers, human rights, gender, sustainability, the climate crisis etc. – supported and challenged within the region, and how are these issues embedded within different heritage processes and methodologies? How are state-sanctioned institutions engaged with, either in co-operation or conflict, different stakeholders and actors? And how do various actors  connect the cultural heritage sector in the MENA region with pressing debates, concerns and experiences in related diasporas abroad?

We welcome cross-disciplinary proposals from individuals at different stages in their careers, including early career researchers, academics and practitioners and from a range of methodological and conceptual perspectives.

Chapter Proposal Submission:

Please send abstracts of 350-500 words to sarina.wakefield@leicester.ac.uk and annette.loeseke@nyu.edu by 30 October 2020.

Deadline for abstracts (chapter proposals): 30 October 2020.

Deadline for submission of full chapters by 30 June 2021; we are proposing that chapters should be between 5000 to 6000 words. Anticipated publication: early 2022.

Edited by: Dr Annette Loeseke (Lecturer in Museum Studies, New York University Berlin) and Dr Sarina Wakefield (Lecturer in Museum Studies, University of Leicester).

Apart from wars, other contexts of social conflict have recently become a setting in which archaeologists are faced with acute, sometimes armed, violence. On the African continent, a region often overlooked in discussions of “archaeology in conflict”, rapid economic development has led to several such scenes. The paper discusses a particularly poignant example from the Middle Nile valley in Sudan, where large dam projects have been met with various levels of opposition by affected populations. Local communities opposing the construction of further planned dams on the Nile are increasingly stressing ‘cultural survival’ and fear of ‘developmental genocide’ as two of their major motivations for fighting these projects. Assuming a close link between the developer and archaeological salvage missions, affected people have started to use the expulsion of salvage teams from their territory as a strategy of resistance—posing an ethical dilemma for the archaeologists who struggle to find a position in the increasingly violent controversies accompanying these contested development projects.

What is the significance of heritage for how welfare is defined? What function does heritage have in the public realm and how is heritage becoming a resource for citizens to gain influence in society? Who and what defines the public debates and the politics about heritage? Is there a knowledge gap between research communities, management, and the public understanding and use of heritage? These are some of the questions that the authors of this book reflect upon. They provide Nordic perspectives on how the management of the past takes place, and how it is carried out in the service of the society, offering new interpretations of the role of heritage in present society, where institutional heritage management has become just one of the many and multiple ways in which different publics engage with cultural heritage. This book addresses the main challenges faced by heritage managers today in light of the changing understanding of heritage in society.

The Islamic Period Museum of Iran was established, almost 16 years after the Islamic Revolution, as an addition to the previous National Museum building – the Iran Bastan, or Ancient Iran Museum – in 1996. By examining the components of state Islamism, the space of the museum and key exhibits, this paper reveals the analogous relationship between the museum and state ideology. That relationship suggests that the museum embodies fundamental ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent in Iranian state Islamism. Those ambiguities and inconsistencies are only concealed, in the museum as in the ideology, by employing traditionalist rhetoric with regard to religion and identity.

Tarkastelen tässä artikkelissa kulttuuriperinnön ja yksilön välistä vuorovaikutusta Vartiokylän linnavuoren ilkivaltatapausten näkökulmasta. Vartiokylän linnavuori on vaurioitunut 1910-luvulta alkaen sekä uudisrakentamisen että ilkivallalla seurauksena. Ilkivallalla tarkoitetaan tässä artikkelissa kulttuuriperintökohteen sellaista haltuunottoa, joka joko tuhoaa kohteen aikaisempia historiallisia kerrostumia tai sellaisia lisäyksiä, jotka vähentävät kohteen alkuperäisyyttä tai tieteellistä informaatioarvoa. Millaisesta kulttuurisesta konfliktista kulttuuriperinnön ilkivaltainen tuhoaminen kertoo?

Olisiko kulttuuriset konfliktit selitettävissä yhteiskunnallisten muutosten; modernin ja post-modernin kulttuuriarvojen kautta? Modernismihan merkitsi perinteisten esteettisten arvojen korvautumista muutoksen ja nykyisyyden arvoilla,  post-modernissa ajassa syvä yhteiskunnallinen muutos ja moniarvoistuminen jatkuivat nopeana. Yhteiskunnalliset muutokset ovat vaikuttaneet siihen, miten ihmiset kokevat menneisyytensä.  Koska kulttuuriperintö ilmentää menneisyyttä, ovat siitä tehtävät tulkinnatkin moninaisia. Tehdyt tulkinnat ovat sidoksissa kulttuuriperintöä tarkastelevan yksilön kohteelle antamiin merkityksiin.

Miksi kaikki eivät tänä päivänä jaa samoja kulttuuri- ja maisema-arvoja, kuin kulttuuriperintöä määrittelevät museoviranomaiset? Voidaanko tuhoaminen nähdä tiedostamattoman toiminnan ja monen sattuman summana? – Ilkivallan tekijällä oli tarve tuhota ja kulttuuriperintökohde valikoitui sattumalta tuhoamisen kohteeksi. John Deweyn näki yleisen apatian, välinpitämättömyyden ja halveksunnan aikaansaavan ihmisten toiminnassa turhautumista ja suoran toiminnan piirteitä.  Kertooko kulttuuriperintökohteiden ilkivaltainen tuhoaminen yksilöiden reaktioista yhteisönsä apaattisuuteen ja piittaamattomuuteen? Onko yhteisön vaalima kulttuuriperintökohde yhteiskunnan hylkäämien yksilöiden vihollinen?

How did early twentieth-century university scholars and museum curators perceive the buildings of peasant society? How did they rebuild them into museum cottages according to contemporary scholarly and museum ideas? In 1913, the philosopher, museum curator and elementary-school inspector Theodor Hellman established the open-air museum Murberget in Härnösand. Prior to his involvement in the open-air museum, he had been very active in the Swedish adult-education movement. For instance, he founded ‘Norrländska studenters folkbildningsförening’ (The Adult Education Society of North Swedish Students) in Uppsala in 1905. He also organised the country’s first local-heritage course for elementary-school teachers in Härnösand in 1907. The same year, 1907, he defended his licentiate dissertation in philosophy at the Uppsala University: ‘Platons kunskapslära’ (Plato’s Theory of Knowledge). ‘Föreningen för norrländsk hembygdsforskning’ (The Society for North Swedish Local Heritage Research), which he founded in 1909, was a development and institutionalisation of the courses in local-heritage education (hembygdsundervisning) and local-heritage research (hembygdsforskning). As to his curatorial work, Hellman divided the open-air museum Murberget into eight culture units, which, according to him, mirrored the people’s character and expressed the North Swedish culture: the Village (Byn), the Chalet (Fäbodvallen), the Fishing Village (Fiskeläget), the Church Site (Kyrkplatsen), the Parsonage (Prästgården), the Iron Works (Järnbruket), the Cityscape (Stadsbilden), and the Lapp Village (Lappbyn). In the present study, I investigate two of the culture units from a history-of-museum point of view: the Chalet and the Church Site. The Chalet was laid out and built with historical houses in 1915–1917, and supplemented in 1930. It represents a typological collection of six types of cooking houses (kokhus) as well as some cattle sheds, all from the province of Ångermanland. The development of the Church Site began in 1913. It comprises the Murberget Church, the Ullånger Bell Tower, two copied medieval lychgates, and a small church town with wooden houses. Built in-situ between 1925 and 1929 as a ‘Protestant medieval’ church for the 1930s North Sweden, the Murberget Church was planned and erected in accordance with contemporary museum ideals, namely the division into study collections (the church attic) and display collections (the nave and chancel).

Central to debates about “heritage” is concern over what “deserves” to be preserved for the future and why, and also over the consequences or effects of defining a particular body of material or intangible culture as “heritage”. This chapter asks what is involved in, and what are the effects of, defining totalitarian architecture and other physical remains of totalitarian eras as heritage. through doing so, it highlights concerns over the performative dimensions of heritage listing and the kind of worth that this is usually seen to bestow. In addition, it shows how “heritage” is not a fixed category but one that undergoes transformations in definition and operationalization.
Beginning with the most internationally prestigious form of heritage listing – that as UNESCO “World Heritage” – the chapter seeks to highlight frictions, unease and tactics involved in listing material culture remains of Totalitarian eras as heritage. In doing so, it also identifies certain directions of ongoing change. It includes discussion of the criteria and contents of the list, as well as some landmark inclusions, especially that of Auschwitz concentration camp. I then turn to an ex- amination of the recent attempt by the City of Nuremberg to have some of its spaces associated with Nazi crime entered into the list, and its more general re- framing of itself as a birthplace of Human Rights, considering these also against a longer history of different forms of heritage listing – and contests over, and effects of, these. e chapter concludes by considering whether we might now be ap- proaching a time when Totalitarian architecture might more readily be officially listed as heritage, and, if so, with what effects.

Abandoned on the coast as skeletons, bunkers are the last theatrical gesture in the history of Western military architecture (Virilio, 1975). Technically obsolete, this military territory has fallen into extinction and is now generally forgotten. We present the Plan Barron of Defense of Lisbon and Setubal case study, a mid-twentieth-century set of bunkers, recently declassified, as a case study to discuss the future of this heritage facing the climate crisis. Can oblivious historical war heritage be an opportunity to fight climate emergencies? We present four theoretical concepts to fundament this environmental positioning: (i) Heritage Management and Climate Governance, (ii) Techno-aesthetic (Simondon, 1992): panopticon territorial cluster; (iii) Military: camouflage as design, and (iv) Civil: inheritance as future potential. The results allow us to look at military architecture in the form of a bunker, as a set of territorial, architectonic, cultural, and social interests. We demo...

Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place. By bringing social movements into heritage studies, the book advocates a shift of perspective in understanding heritage, one that is no longer bound by (at times arbitrary) divisions such as those assumed between the state and people or between experts and non-experts.

REVIEWS
“This book significantly contributes to our understanding of the complexities of heritage in Asia. It broadens our horizons to look at issues of governance, state-society relations, and the institutional ways memory and material culture are politically negotiated. It reveals heritage as a series of movements, unpacking, elaborating and critiquing what that term means in different social settings. An exciting contribution to the examination of heritage in Asia.” • Tim Winter, University of Western Australia, Professor of Critical Heritage studies, Author of Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century

“The book is a wake-up call for heritage practitioners who still too easily think of the material past as a static and unmediated record of times past. Heritage Movements in Asia reminds us that the heritage expert is only one among numerous players competing to inscribe meaning on the traces of the past embedded in the ground we all live on. As this book vividly illustrates, heritage activism, whether in the form of mass mobilisation or more intimate engagements, is what gives the material past its dynamism.” • Denis Byrne, Author of Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia

“Looking at heritage processes through the lens of social movements, this volume adds a meaningful contribution to the growing literature of critical heritage studies.” • Neel Kamal Chapagain, Director of the Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University

An essay for Public Books, spurred by a research project completed with colleagues and students at the National College of Arts in Lahore. Featuring: metal detectors, sidewalk motorcyclists, nighttime trespassers, anticolonial assemblies, dead Liberals, young architects, welcome encroachments, pigeon roosts, heritage activists and more.

Originally posted at: https://www.publicbooks.org/fill-the-halls-space-and-possibility-in-lahore-pakistan/

The richness of Africa’s heritage at times stands in stark contrast to the economic, health, political, and societal challenges that the continent faces across variegated contexts. Development is essential but in what forms? For whom? Following whose agendas? At what costs? This book, with a special focus on sub-Saharan Africa, explores how heritage can promote, secure, or undermine sustainable development, and in turn, how this affects conceptions of heritage. The chapters identify shared challenges, good practices and failures, and use specific case studies to provide detailed insights into varied forms of heritage and heritage defining processes. By critically analysing the often romanticised discourses of ‘heritage’, ‘community engagement’, and ‘sustainable development’ it suggests ways of harnessing aspects of heritage to tackle some of the socioeconomic and political pressures facing heritage practices on the continent, including the legacies of colonialism.

Cultural heritage is often seen as a tool for managing social change, as a mirror that society holds up to itself to make sense of change. In this paper I examine how heritage also mobilizes social change, framing cultural heritage as a persuasive tool in a public sphere of competing interests and claims. Rather than taking the circulation of heritage in the public sphere—across media outlets, social media, and expert networks—as epiphenomenal to its value, I suggest deliberation composes a critical function of cultural heritage, especially under social conditions of deep pluralism, divisive politics, and mass democracy that mark our contemporary era. The public discussions about Confederate commemorations that erupted following the events in Charlottesville in 2017 demonstrate the contests over meaning and proposed actions that reveal the persuasive character of heritage.

Folk songs have long been perceived as national identity markers. In Central Europe, the research of folk singing was closely linked to the national movements of the nineteenth century. Bilingual folksongs or singing in "non-national" language were omitted from the field of folklore as non-coherent practices. This paper presents a historical analysis that focuses on singing in "national" and "non-national" language in Goriška brda (the Gorizia Hills) and Venetian Slovenia along today's Slovenian-Italian border. Changing borders and people belonging to different state formations have influenced the changing social and cultural contexts and thus the use of language(s) in songs. The normality of the coexistence of different linguistic groups in border regions has long been reflected in (folk) songs even during intense political situations. Today, the Slovenian language is often used in (folk) singing in Venetian Slovenia as a heritage language.

ABSTRACT
Problem, research strategy, and findings: When Arnstein created the ladder of participation, local
gov-
ernments engaged predominately urban African-American neighborhoods through federally funded pro-
grams. Fifty years later, preservationists and heritage conservationists pursuing participatory
engagement
models in these communities find sustaining interest difficult. Absent from planning literature is
guidance
on how to ensure grassroots preservationists of color retain control during engagement. In this
study we
ask practitioners and scholars to consider the optimum approach to researching or preservation
planning
in this context. Through participatory action and ethnographic research, one of us (Roberts) helped
design a hybrid forum-style symposium dedicated to preserving historic Black settlement heritage.
As a
researcher and symposium co-planner, I documented local preservation knowledge using questionnaires
and performative storytelling while helping descendants of historic African-American settlements
identify
shared priorities and challenges. Findings suggest action researchers and preservationists must
“remix”
roles and the rungs of Arnstein’s ladder of participation to sustain and center stakeholder
involvement
when planning with marginalized communities. Remixing consists of strategically sampling, looping,
and
layering promising local knowledge with that of experts to support citizen-centered preservation
plan-
ning. By centering culturally informed planning approaches and negotiating with stakeholders,
professio-
nals can create the conditions for participation that support sustained involvement. Symposium co-
organizing and data collection catalyzed the ethical coproduction of knowledge and fostered ongoing
research and collaborative projects after study completion.
Takeaway for practice: Remixing as praxis offers a framework for engaged preservation and heritage
conservation that reinforces citizen empowerment through identification and application of
innovative
practices rooted in local knowledge. Identifying local practices that foster attachment and break
down
the hierarchy between expert and grassroots practitioners is essential to achieving praxis.

Notes from a lecture presented at the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, University of Melbourne in 2012 (and in subsequent years) to students in the Masters of Cultural Materials Conservation program. The lecture outlines the context and features of graffiti and street art in Melbourne, its sites and material objects, relationship to formal and informal archives and some key case studies, such as the destruction of artworks by Banksy. It discusses the forms of value that might be attached to graffiti and street art (social, historical and aesthetic) and ends by outlining some of the implications for understanding heritage, including anti-heritage approaches and possible conservation strategies.

“Heritage” has the power to create “community”. This is why it constantly implicates also certain processes of exclusion, which call for new participatory approaches. It is exactly this very complex and problematic interplay between the concepts “heritage”, “community” and “participation” which lies at the centre of this research project. The field of this research
is constituted by the Dolomites which have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2009 and which hence represent an interesting research context. But this UNESCO inscription is limited only to the natural mountain landscape of the Dolomites and not to the “cultural heritage” of the Ladin people who live within these mountains. This research project
focuses – with a participative approach – on emic conceptions of this “Ladin cultural heritage”. In a first step, “cultural heritage” is identified through the direct involvement of the population. In a second step, a sustainable management of this “cultural heritage” is developed which is supported by both, civil society and public institutions.

Published Open Access in the edited volume Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene, published by Open Humanities Press as part of their Critical Climate Change series. Whole volume available to download from the OHP site: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/deterritorializing-the-future/

Memories before the State examines the discussions and debates surrounding the creation of the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion (LUM), a national museum in Peru that memorializes the country’s internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. Emerging from a German donation that the Peruvian government initially rejected, the Lima-based museum project experienced delays, leadership changes, and limited institutional support as planners and staff devised strategies that aligned the LUM with a new class of globalized memorial museums and responded to political realities of the country’s postwar landscape. The book analyzes forms of authority that emerge as an official institution seeks to incorporate and manage diverse perspectives on recent violence.

This article builds on recent discussions on intangible heritage following the adoption of the relevant convention by UNESCO in 2003. The emergence of intangible heritage in the international heritage scene is tied up with fears of cultural homogenization and the need to protect the world's diversity. For a number of critics, however, UNESCO's normative framework raises questions around the institutionalization of culture as a set of endangered and disappearing ways of life. The article reviews these institutional approaches to cultural preservation in relation to the politics of erasure, the creative interplay of heritage destruction and renewal. This is then further examined against the backdrop of indigenous identity politics played out in two contested public arenas: the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

In 2014, Cape Town is celebrating its design in all its forms, having been voted
the World Design Capital (WDC). The hopeful rhetoric of the city as ultimate
holiday destination, African creative metropolis, prime global-events location or
city of freedom indicates powerful cultural discourses at work. In this paper, I
will give a series of insights into the links between colonial modernity, on the
one hand, and the origins of contemporary discourses of urban design and
heritage in Cape Town, on the other. I intend to discuss the function of official
discourse concerning the design of the city as well as the sudden eruptions that
disturb these constructs. I point to the recurrent patterns and moments in
which design is made plain and unspoken. I will trace the genealogy of official
or top-down design and heritage discourses as well as the moments or
movements that are at odds with or embarrass this official discourse.

This study seeks to enhance our understanding of the complexities of heritage and the place of minority narratives within this process, thus creating a dialogue for cultural diversity in heritage management practice. The study is framed around two research questions: What are the factors, tensions and power-relations that contribute to how heritage is valorised in the case study of Cornwall? How might events like the Man Engine (2016) be understood as heritage practice that bridges the tensions of official and unofficial heritage? In order to answer the research questions a tripartite approach is undertaken, first studying official processes including Cornwall’s designation as a World Heritage Site (2006) and the Cornish as a National Minority (2014). Unofficial or alternative forms of heritage that take an everyday, embodied form is then examined. Finally, heritage making that bridges these two processes is explored  - the Man Engine Pilgrimage a popular performative heritage which made a pilgrimage across the landscape visiting old mining sites as an act of community remembrance, spatial identity and celebration. This research found several factors contributed to how heritage was valorised and depended on who the stakeholders were and their motivations. Both affected what was seen as heritage (the narrative) and how those messages were communicated (forms of mediation). All factors thus had impacts on how heritage was perceived and valorised. The study concludes that heritage in Cornwall is defined and ‘valorised’ in different ways, giving rise to diverse social, cultural, political and economic meanings and signification, depending on the perspectives within official and unofficial processes.  There are however crossovers between what and who is doing this valuing. In addition, valorisation complexities lead to tensions and barriers over who is effectively involved. The research argues that the Man Engine traversed some of these barriers and in this sense was a bridging process between official and unofficial heritage. It offers a model of practice, an inclusive vehicle for expression of authorised discourses but also grassroots sociocultural values, and called attention to ways that heritage is used and celebrated through both formal and informal processes and practices.  The study illustrates how institutions can build in ‘from-below’ practices, create conditions for co-production and recognise a plurality of values. The study makes a theoretical contribution to knowledge and extends the boundaries of research methods within the field of critical heritage studies. It draws on both critical and performance theories to illuminate how processes of ‘valorisation’ operate. The study observed affective dimensions and these were found to be important trajectories of how heritage becomes valorised. This adds to a growing body of research that understands that heritage valorisation is about representation and affect. This transdisciplinary approach, bridging theory and practice, offers a way to view multivocality in valorisation and promotes democratisation of heritage as active production and recognition of voices that have been marginalised or omitted.

The issue of heritage in the Anthropocene raises questions of how we can become better ancestors to future generations. This piece, our front piece from our project "Checking in with Deep Time" (Formas funded), takes up and elaborates on some of our key ethical and practical issues from this project. And it does so from starting points in contemporary waste management at a (g)local waste-to-energy fascility in Linköping, Sweden, building on distinct field work and field philosophical work from 2018 and 2019. The chapter (available for free with Open Humanities Press in the new volume Deterritorializing the Future) is also entitled Che cking in with Deep Time. Enjoy.