ABSTRACT The paper offers the first regular exploration of Poland’s State Agricultural Farms (pol. Państwowe Gospodarstwo Rolne, hereafter PGR) within critical heritage studies. Despite a growing interest in socialist heritage, current heritagization efforts prioritise artistic values and elite narratives, leaving rural and agricultural landscapes, such as PGRs, marginalised. By presenting an attempt at typology of contemporary PGRs – museum-adapted, repurposed and ruined – the paper introduces the concept of fallowed heritage – disturbing, unwanted and neglected within official heritage discourses, largely due to its associations with agriculture under the Soviet rule in East-Central Europe. This study combines critical heritage studies and critical animal studies to investigate PGRs not only as politicised material remnants but also as sites of multispecies entanglements involving human and non-human actors under Soviet-style agricultural production. Drawing from fieldwork, archival research and interviews, the study contextualises PGRs within Poland’s socio-economic transformation after 1989 and examines their erasure from memory, despite their rich potential to shed light on the complex history in the region. By tracing their transformation from collectivised agricultural estates to symbols of ineffectiveness and decay, this paper underscores the significance of PGRs as a critical, though neglected, element of East-Central European heritage landscape and calls for their re-examination within broader frameworks of social, cultural and environmental history.

ABSTRACT The way we narrate our industrial heritage and make its energy reliance visible or invisible matters. In this article, we examine how history of technology museums cultivate narratives of progress and what that might mean for rethinking cultural heritage. We ask what it would mean to expose the fossil fuels that power the engines of industrialisation and the environmental damage those fuels have wrought as part of our industrialisation cultural legacy. Using displays of the Industrial Revolution in the National Science Museum, Daejeon, South Korea, and the German Museum of Technology, Berlin, Germany, we demonstrate that the technological narrative of progress covers up the environmental cost of modern dependence on fossil fuels. These technological progress narratives are built on unseen carbon cultures, i.e. the cultural, social, economic and political systems of modern societies which have become dependent upon and imagined through fossil fuels in all aspects of society. We offer three alternative possibilities for the narration of these industrial revolution histories to incorporate environmental history: setting industrial revolution objects into an Anthropocene or climate change frame instead of an industrialisation narrative; reinterpreting objects as material legacies of carbon cultures; and making visible the power behind industrialisation.

ABSTRACT From the outset of independence from British rule in 1960, Cyprus was marked by intercommunal conflict between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots, which led to the abrupt division of the island in 1974; a key moment in Cyprus’s modern history, fragmenting the island with buffer and military zones. Inevitably, modern architecture that was once embraced as a vehicle to nation building and a path to modernity became entangled with decolonial struggles, intercommunal conflict, and the island’s current physical and socio-political division, comprising some unintended heritage, of which its value is ambiguously defined. This article discusses the theoretical framework of ‘Uneasy, but Shared Heritage’ that moves beyond the binary of contested or shared heritage, and introduces USHer, a mobile app devised as a methodological experiment informed by contemporary debates that challenge official heritage lists and the role of digital tools in opening the meaning(s) of value – what is defined as heritage and why, by whom and for whom – to a broader audience. As a disciplinary encounter between architectural history and critical heritage studies, USHer is investigated as a mediation of the intangible value of architectural heritage in contested territories.

ABSTRACT Engagement with cultural heritage is often presented as beneficial for mental and physical wellbeing, and museums increasingly promote themselves as inclusive institutions. Yet digital heritage practices can unintentionally perpetuate inequalities and reproduce harm when sensitive subjects such as sexual violence are euphemised or recontextualised without care. This paper examines how the Dutch Rijksmuseum’s digital collection mediates sexual violence through its cataloguing language, multilingual search functions and visitor-generated content. Quantitative mapping of search results in Dutch and English was combined with qualitative interpretation of metadata descriptions, institutional tags and interface pathways to analyse how depictions of sexual violence become visible or obscured. The results reveal systematic patterns, including euphemistic and sanitising language, inconsistent terminology across languages and unmoderated visitor features that can expose users to triggering content. These patterns demonstrate how well-intentioned efforts to democratise digital heritage risk undermining inclusivity. This article proposes feminist ethics of care and trauma-informed approaches to digital heritage practices, prioritising non-euphemistic metadata, critical contextualisation of patriarchal structures, content warnings and points of pause, and community-based moderation of visitor features. Centring survivor wellbeing reframes digital heritage not as a neutral repository but as a care infrastructure, positioning museums as accountable to users and survivor communities.

ABSTRACT This article analyses UNESCO’s responses to the destruction of much of Gaza’s cultural heritage since the onset of the war in October 2023. Moving beyond portrayals of UNESCO as a norm entrepreneur and exemplar of cultural diplomacy or, alternatively, as an agency mired in politicisation and gridlock, we provide an alternative account by introducing the concepts of ‘institutional drift’ and ‘normative vacuum’. Via an analysis of UNESCO’s handling of the conflict in Gaza, we demonstrate that despite the agency’s formal mandate remaining unchanged, its core functions have withered in practice: it failed to name Israel as the key perpetrator and neglected to admonish it for breaching relevant treaties and international law. We then demonstrate how this drift has created a void that other actors not normally associated with heritage protection were forced to fill. Together, they have catalogued site-specific damage, attributed responsibility, and framed violations in juridical terms. The devastation of heritage in Gaza therefore exposes the limits of multilateral heritage governance, revealing how authority frays and functions migrate under conditions of asymmetric power and occupation. The article concludes by noting that UNESCO’s failures in Gaza set a significant precedent that risk normalising impunity for heritage crimes.

ABSTRACT This paper introduces ways of approaching heritage as future-oriented through the concepts of hope and potentiality. The future is today increasingly being described in dystopian terms, related to multiple global crises. In these times, the capacity to take a proactive stand towards more hopeful futures – even if they may seem beyond likelihood – is more needed than ever. By connecting several fields that seldom meet, this paper develops a way of conceptualising heritage that is focused on how it can serve as a vehicle to imagine and move towards hopeful futures. The study draws upon and connect relevant ideas and concepts from critical futures studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and heritage studies. The paper argues that through attempts of redeeming past potentials that persist as ghosts haunting the present, heritage can stimulate actions towards hopeful futures. Even when past potentials can never be fully realised, partial realisation tends to breed new hope. This conceptualisation of heritage is not focused on restoration by using an idealised past as a blueprint for a better future. Instead, it is a critical and reflective way of using heritage to carve out a future of radical difference and invest such a future with hope.

ABSTRACT This paper rethinks the epistemological foundations of heritage by advancing the concept of dialogical reproduction, a performative model that explains how cultural value endures through acts of response, reinterpretation, and renewal. Global heritage governance, shaped by Enlightenment binaries and codified in UNESCO conventions, divides culture into tangible, intangible, and documentary domains; yet such classifications obscure the relational and processual nature of cultural life. Building on relational ontology and entanglement theory, the study argues that heritage persists not through preservation but through performance: practices that continually make and remake relations amongpeople, practices, and places. Drawing on the longue durée of the Orchid Pavilion Gathering (Lanting), a fourth-century Chinese ritual-literary event re-created through calligraphy, ritual, and place-making, the paper traces how copying, reconstruction, and re-enactment function as dialogical processes that sustain meaning across time. Integrating insights from performance studies and anthropology, it proposes dialogical reproduction as a framework for rethinking heritage as a practice of responsiveness: an ongoing conversation between past and present, material and human, continuity and change. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative to classificatory and possessive heritage regimes, highlighting how governance can recognise cultural continuity as relational, iterative, and historically situated.

ABSTRACT This article examines a government-led ‘Yi-style’ urban façade renovation in Ninglang County, Yunnan Province, to explore how state policy, local design practices, and multiethnic expressions intersect. Drawing on ethnographic research, it argues that the project’s outcomes reflect not a unified government-led design but a process of bricolage – in Lévi-Strauss’s sense – where ethnic cultural fragments are pieced together to meet diverse demands. To promote tourism, local officials imposed standardised Yi aesthetics on the facades of buildings, including fixed colour schemes, architectural components totemic forms and motifs from Yi lacquerware and textiles. Yet most local designers, lacking formal training, acted more as bricoleurs, sourcing patterns from online databases and repurposing symbols to secure approval rather than creating original designs. This bricolage reinforced Yi identity while prompting residents of other ethnic groups to reflect and articulate their own cultural symbols. Viewing Ninglang’s transformation through bricolage moves beyond binaries – state versus local, tradition versus modernity, self versus other – and to illuminate the tensions and negotiations inherent in constructing ethnic cultural heritage in China’s multiethnic Southwest. Finally, this study extends the utility of bricolage beyond its structuralist perspective, situating it as a framework for analysing multi-party negotiation and practicing in heritage-making.

ABSTRACT This article examines the entanglement of archaeology, power, and professional ethics in the Occupied Palestinian Territories through the case of Sebastia, a multi-layered heritage site northwest of Nablus. It argues that Israeli governmental and settler interventions have transformed archaeology from a scientific practice into a political instrument for territorial control and ideological legitimation. Through analysis of conservation policies, planning documents, and heritage governance frameworks, the paper identifies three interrelated strategies through which cultural heritage has been weaponised: the establishment of a permanent Israeli presence, the construction of a historical narrative centred on Jewish antiquity while marginalising the site’s Palestinian dimensions, and the use of this curated narrative to justify de facto and de jure annexation. Framed within Herzfeld’s concept of crypto-colonialism, the article shows how heritage management in Sebastia situates Israel as a ‘civilizing’ guardian of Western values confronting a constructed Eastern other. In contrast, Palestinian-led and cross-border initiatives articulate alternative models of heritage grounded in community custodianship and shared stewardship. By revealing how professional silence within Israeli archaeology reinforces exclusionary policies, the article calls for a renewed ethical engagement that recognises heritage as a field of political responsibility and as a potential medium for decolonised practice.