Heritage, public history and democracy

Large-scale transformations in social sciences and the Humanities in the 1960 and 1970s (such as the emergence of cultural studies, memory studies, postcolonial studies and gender studies, public history, etc.) influenced the formation of heritage studies in the 1980s. Within the framework of this field, the concept of heritage has been substantially revised: it began to cover the sphere of the ordinary and everyday; its temporal boundaries have changed, so the objects related to the recent past began to be considered as heritage; the idea of de-monopolization of state experts in determining heritage was proposed. In the 2000s, a separate area of critical heritage studies emerged within heritage studies. Its purpose was to study the discursive practices of defining and using heritage, used primarily by the state and international institutions (the so-called “authorized heritage discourse”, AHD, proposed by a theorist Laurajane Smith); as well as the problematization of heritage as a process of constant rethinking and redefining of identities and cultural values, which involves different social groups, communities and agents. The paper examines the transformation of the understanding of heritage-as-an-object into heritage as a social action and heritage-as-process discussed in heritage studies and critical heritage studies in European countries. It presents an overview of the key stages of their development and subsequent changes, the main research issues and problems, as well as their current debates.

The cultural heritage was defined in the 19th century in many European countries and the United States as “objects of cultural value.” In the context of building national states mostly material objects, archaeological sites and historical monuments, were marked as heritage. Further transformation of the concept of heritage took place after the World War II, when not only national and mostly European states, but also new international organizations (United Nations, UNESCO and later European Union) began to re-define and revise cultural heritage. The large-scale transformations in the social sciences and the humanities in the 1960–70s influenced the formation a new research field in the 1980s, heritage studies. Using the approaches taken from public history and cultural, memory, postcolonial and gender studies, heritage studies conceptualize heritage in more broad temporal boundaries and network of agents involved in the process of its formation. Within heritage studies, cultural heritage covers the sphere of ordinary and everyday life, distant and recent past, different social groups and their vision of heritage. In the 2000s, heritage studies were debated. As a result, a new field of critical heritage studies emerged. The key task put in the field was to analyze discursive practices of defining and using heritage primarily by state and international institutions (the so-called “Authorized Heritage Discourse”). The scholars conceptualize heritage as a process, discourse and participatory cultural phenomenon. So, heritage is understood as a constant rethinking and redefinition cultural values by different agents––social groups, media, institutions, which are also constantly changing. The paper examines the research fields of heritage studies and critical heritage studies in Europe. It provides an overview of their development and subsequent changes, as well as the main research issues and problems.

This article is informed by and contributes to the recent groundswell of research on the affordances and limitations, opportunities and challenges of walking. Crucially, it brings these concerns into dialogue with critical heritage studies, establishing a discursive field at the intersection of scholarship on walking, memory, heritage, and public history. It does so by discussing an ongoing practice-led research project that centers on creating, leading, and evaluating historical walking tours and self-guided trails of a large public park in Glasgow, Scotland, using this site as a way to interrogate the city’s connections to empire. The author argues that walking can be a tool for interweaving under-represented histories—here, histories of slavery, colonialism and imperialism—into dominant heritage discourses, and through such an intervention lay bare the dissonance between presence and absence that underpins constructions and expressions of heritage. This leads to the theorization of walking as a critical heritage practice—a means of actively scrutinizing the politics of remembrance and forgetting. Therefore, this article presents a case study that can inform similar efforts to increase public knowledge of so-called hidden and forgotten histories and, by extension, promote critical engagement with sites of civic memory and critical understanding of heritage as a social and cultural process that harnesses the past in order to construct a sense of place, belonging, and identity in the present.

ABSTRACTIn recent years an interest in ‘critical heritage studies’ (CHS) has grown significantly – its differentiation from ‘heritage studies’ rests on its emphasis of cultural heritage as a political, cultural, and social phenomenon. But how original or radical are the concepts and aims of CHS, and why has it apparently become useful or meaningful to talk about critical heritage studies as opposed to simply ‘heritage studies’? Focusing on the canon of the 1980s and 1990s heritage scholarship – and in particular the work of the ‘father of heritage studies’, David Lowenthal – this article offers a historiographical analysis of traditional understandings and approaches to heritage, and the various explanations behind the post-WWII rise of heritage in western culture. By placing this analysing within the wider frames of post-war historical studies and the growth of scholarly interest in memory, the article seeks to highlight the limitations and bias of the much of the traditional heritage canon, and in turn frame the rationale for the critical turn in heritage studies.

Mapping the future trajectory of critical heritage studies, this paper provides a non-Anglophone perspective on the concept of ‘critical’ within the contemporary framework of critical heritage studies in China. It emphasises that scholarship from non-Anglophone regions should not be marginalised as a mere footnote, stereotypically portrayed as ‘the other’ in relation to Western discourse. Instead, these perspectives actively contribute to the field, engaging with global challenges. The notion of being ‘critical’ in this context is not a simple translation or appropriation of Western concepts, nor a straightforward critique of prevailing political and value systems. Rather, it represents an approach that integrates historical, transcultural, and political perspectives deeply rooted in local society and culture. These insights empower scholarship from non-Anglophone regions to enrich critical heritage studies with diverse intellectual resources, avoiding new forms of Western imperialism. In doing so, they fulfill critical heritage studies’ foundational promise of reshaping power dynamics in the realm of heritage studies.

This article proposes a history of the ideas of heritage founded on the differentiation between the concepts of heritage and patrimoine according to the two official languages in which they are approached and considered in Canada: that is, English and French. To do this, the author examines a varied corpus of published and unpublished historic and contemporary documents in order to determine the paradigms, the significance, and the practices that underlie the articulation and usage of the words heritage, patrimoine, and a few of their equivalents, according to their respective eras. In particular, by distinguishing patrimoine from heritage, we can also observe a metalanguage that opposes the institution and the status(es) that it confers to the community and its organic participation, which permits the assimilation of patrimoine, in French, to an ideological apparatus and to a social order, exclusive by definition, then observe the propagation of the meaning and its practices carried by the word patrimoine in French beyond the boundaries of language and into those that we now associate with heritage in English. After having identified the manifestations of this metalanguage in francophone and anglophone epistemologies of heritage studies and critical heritage studies, the author retraces several examples in the diverse regions of Canada, which permits a contrast between the parameters that define the concepts of heritage and patrimoine through what is (to be) common or what is (to be) transmitted, and whether the target is more focused on propriety or on usage. Finally, this “thick description” of the metalanguages of patrimoine and heritage allow us to discern what we could categorize as Canadian hybrids, born of the proximity of ideas of heritage and patrimoine on this territory, and to propose that in-depth intellectual inquiries might seize upon them to contribute to the resolution of theoretical and epistemological issues that the actions of public powers on heritage and patrimoine raise in the contemporary world.

This article explores the possible relationships between critical heritage studies and interculturality. It argues that interculturality offers a call to action and normative commitments that is welcome to advance critical heritage studies. The article examines the intersections across the two fields using the ideas of normative engagement, status of the two fields in liberal political discourse, and the notions of recognition and redistribution as goals of historically oppressed groups. The article uses the examples of Indigenous and Afro-descendant heritage to connect heritage to the work of interculturality in attempting to create and promote better polities. The article then discusses some of the potentials and pitfalls of closer alignment between the fields of interculturality and critical heritage studies.

What are the effects and significance of inscribing an archive or group of documents in a heritage list? In light of the positive effects of digital technology on archival science, should all archives and past documents be considered “heritage,” or are some more significant than others? What are the implications and benefits of a heritage archive? Is creating a digital database of a specific archive considered part of heritage conservation? Is the term "heritagization" or "heritage making" a synonym for preservation or conservation?In this article, I will attempt to answer some of these questions from the point of view of premodern literature, drawing on recent researches in heritage studies, specifically in the subfield of "critical heritage studies. After briefly introducing the current state of heritage scholarship, I will present the definition of "textual heritage" that I developed during my most recent project. Secondly, to reflect on how the concept of textual heritage can affect our understanding of historical archives, I will present the case of the Hyakugo Archive of Toji Temple (Kyoto, Japan), a collection of 19,000 documents dating from the eight to the eighteenth century, which was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World List in 2005 and has been fully digitized and made available to the public via the Internet. I will examine a particular historical event that occurred during the 17th century, which can be viewed as a re-birth of this archive as a cultural heritage and reflect on the implications of this event for the survival of the archive itself and its use today.

In 2015–2016 the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg conducted an interdisciplinary pilot project in collaboration with the SOM-institute. The aim was to demonstrate the usefulness of combining an analysis rooted in the field of critical heritage studies with statistics. The study was based on a critical discussion of the concept of cultural heritage and the data was collected from the nationwide SOM-surveys. The paper highlights some patterns in the SOM data from 2015 on sociodemographic and attitude differences in activities traditionally associated with national cultural heritage instititions: 1) women are more involved in activities than men; 2) besides gender, class and education are also important variables in this context. 3) The most important finding in this paper is that people with a negative attitude towards immigration to a lesser degree participate in activities that are traditionally associated with their ‘own’ national cultural heritage.

With the introduction of Critical Heritage Studies (CHS) in China, a double standard has emerged regarding understanding the authorised heritage discourse (AHD) domestically and abroad. Some researchers are generally critical of Eurocentric conceptions of heritage, while only partially abandoning criticism of authoritarian ideology and unequal social structures when confronted with problems in local official heritage practices. The paper outlines two common theoretical positions for dealing with this double standard: One is ‘rejecting’ or ‘reconsidering’ the AHD concept on the grounds of the specific Chinese context, arguing that the local official heritage discourse, unlike that of ‘the West’, is useful and able to engage with the community. The other is to achieve a de-politicised CHS by emphasising ‘pure’ interaction processes in heritage practices, moving towards loosely structured social relations between stakeholders with plural values. This paper explores the irrationality of these two positions, arguing that they ignore, to varying degrees, the structural constraints of promoting public participation of underprivileged groups in the Chinese context. It raises concerns about how the CHS approach can practically benefit social justice rather than being appropriated when working with epistemologies of heritage in different cultural, language and political contexts.

The traditional history education in China has been challenged ever since the dawn of the twenty first century. This article argues that public history, as an emergent and reflective practice, constitutes an effective intervention into the traditional history education in three significant ways. These three aspects are learnable, but are not easily teachable through mere cosmetic reform of the current historical curriculum; the real changes should come from outside of the established frame of reference, i.e. history teachers with public history knowledge and skills. With an in-depth analysis of three national public history faculty training programs (2014-2019), the article further suggests that public history provides new direction in teaching the past in China.

Cultural heritage is increasingly mobilized as a tool of international engagement, yet the diplomatic uses of heritage remain conceptually underdeveloped and analytically fragmented. This paper introduces the Heritage Diplomacy Spectrum, a multidimensional framework that maps how states and affiliated actors use heritage—both tangible and intangible—to pursue strategic, symbolic, and normative goals in cross-border contexts. Drawing on critical heritage studies, international relations, and memory politics, this study identifies six analytical dimensions (e.g., proactive vs. reactive, cultural vs. historical, strategic vs. moral) and develops seven ideal types of heritage diplomacy, ranging from soft power projection to post-dependency and corrective diplomacy. These ideal types, constructed in the Weberian tradition, serve as heuristic tools to illuminate the varied motivations and diplomatic postures underlying heritage-based engagement. A central matrix is presented to illustrate how each type aligns with different strategic logics and affective registers. This study argues that heritage diplomacy constitutes a distinct modality of heritage governance—one that transcends soft power narratives and encompasses conflict, reconciliation, symbolic redress, and identity assertion. The framework contributes both to theory-building and policy analysis, offering a diagnostic lens through which the ethical, political, and communicative dimensions of heritage diplomacy can be more systematically understood.

Exchanging Symbols: Monuments and Memorials in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Advancing Critical Heritage Studies: the Next 10 Years, which focuses on the growth of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) since 2012, and the development of and challenges facing critical heritage studies in general. The special issue is a collection of short articles that, rather than present academic debates written in expected academic uses and conventions, offers a glimpse into the discussions that define the growing field of heritage studies today. Minimally referenced but rich in archival information, the contributions are records of past and present motivations, solutions, and oversights that drove the first ten years of work by different members of the ACHS Executive Committee, ACHS Chapters, and other contributors. As the issue’s editors, we offer these discussions as a companion to the growth of critical heritage studies, and to encourage both support and critique for the ways in which an organization navigates the complicated landscapes of heritage expertise.

This article explores a collaborative public history project between a small liberal arts undergraduate institution and a community social service agency. Drawing on evidence from student reflections and other course materials, it argues that undergraduate students gained important skills through the public history practicum including teamwork and problemsolving skills, intercultural awareness, and reflective practices, as well as discipline-specific learning outcomes. In documenting the student outcomes, it also demonstrates the potential of public history to contribute to undergraduate students' civic capabilities.