Abstract
This article is the product of prolonged wrestling with the question of how heritage professionals and researchers can facilitate and sustain public agency in caring for heritage in the UK during austerity without exploiting volunteers or devaluing professionals. It offers critical perspectives on efforts made to democratise heritage in the UK by increasing public participation through a critique of neoliberalism and the rise of neoliberal approaches in the heritage sector. It argues that the adoption of neoliberal approaches, such as crowdsourcing, that profess to democratise yet reinforce existing power structures, is the inevitable result of insisting on protecting material culture from harm, despite the continuing accumulation of more ‘heritage’. Drawing on critical perspectives on participation from a number of disciplines, it is suggested that efforts to increase public participation in heritage cannot hope to avoid exploiting volunteers, devaluing professionals and marginalising traditionally underrepresented demographics unless they also let go of the perceived need to protect the materiality of the past. Drawing on Sarah May’s archaeology of contemporary tigers, this article argues that the application of endangerment narratives to heritage reinforces uncritical understandings of both heritage and volunteering that preclude heritage from fulfilling its potential function as a contemporary social process.
Highlights
The coining of ‘critical heritage studies’ (Harrison 2010) and establishment of the international Association for Critical Heritage Studies are emblematic of the rise of a more socially aware heritage studies with its focus on questions of power, authority, ethics and the wider socio-economic and political consequences of heritage and heritage practices
Drawing on critical perspectives on participation from a number of disciplines, it is suggested that efforts to increase public participation in heritage cannot hope to avoid exploiting volunteers, devaluing professionals and marginalising traditionally underrepresented demographics unless they let go of the perceived need to protect the materiality of the past
Due to neoliberalism’s penchant for masking its capitalistic and deregulatory intensions in a rhetoric of freedom, democratisation and innovation, and its incredible success in doing so through domineering economic disruptions like the ‘sharing economy’, heritage professionals, scholars and volunteers would do well to be wary of new ‘democratising’ initiatives intended to double as relief for pressurised institutional budgets
Summary
The coining of ‘critical heritage studies’ (Harrison 2010) and establishment of the international Association for Critical Heritage Studies are emblematic of the rise of a more socially aware heritage studies with its focus on questions of power, authority, ethics and the wider socio-economic and political consequences of heritage and heritage practices. Heritage professionals and academics have made deliberate steps to distance themselves from the exploitative neoliberal roots of crowdsourcing by rebranding it as ‘community-sourcing’ or ‘citizen humanities’ (Phillips 2014; Tanner 2015) These efforts highlight how the adoption of crowdsourcing approaches in heritage contexts emphasise engagement, community-building and the participant-led elements of projects to demonstrate that they are not as exclusively task-oriented as their commercial forebears. Such interventions may not always be welcomed, as they alter the equation of ‘inclusion’ to one where change is required of all parties, yet this is exactly what is required for heritage to ever break free of the authorised heritage discourse, and truly be for everyone
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