ABSTRACT Cultural heritage governance in Norway, as in many countries, is organised through a sectoral split: built heritage and cultural landscapes are managed by environmental authorities, while museums and other cultural policy instruments fall under the Ministry of Culture. This conceptual article asks whether that split matters for lay experiences of heritage and for the perceived relevance and legitimacy of governance, and how cultural policy can respond without major institutional restructuring. Drawing on Critical Heritage Studies and cultural policy research, the article develops a framework of three governance logics – authorised protection, project/event programming and care/stewardship – tied to distinct evidence regimes, temporalities and budgetary logics. Using Norwegian vignettes, it shows how these arrangements shape visibility and recognition, access to protection and resources, participation and legitimacy, and the effectiveness of heritage measures over time. The article proposes four design principles – interface coherence, evidentiary parity, recognition proportionality and a care horizon – to align cultural heritage governance with lived heritage while preserving arm’s length arrangements.

ABSTRACT Coastal land reclamation is transforming many land-sea interfaces across Southeast Asia. Large-scale real estate development projects along the littoral result in the widespread displacement of fishing and coastal communities and severe environmental impacts. Situated at the intersection of urban anthropology and critical heritage studies, this paper explores the impact of land reclamation and urban transformation on the self-proclaimed Tanjung Tokong heritage fishing village in Penang, Malaysia. Ethnographic insights from this tiny community shed light on two underexplored themes in research on speculative cities along the littoral, especially for fishers’ socionatural connections to the sea: exclaving and self-heritagization. Scholars approach the act of reclaiming land from the sea for high-end real estate development as an enclave-making process. Yet, based on emic and more intimate articulations of the self and the sea, this paper considers the exclaving effects that land reclamation plays both landward and seaward. Then, by exploring the ways fishers and other coastal residents employ heritage discourses to reclaim a future along a littoral where there seem to be no place for them, the paper reveals their attempts at self-heritagization and its limits.

Abstract Surabaya, Indonesia, is a city shaped by two types of urban heritage: colonial heritage and kampungs— former residential, irregular settlements of locals oriented towards community. However, most literature studies each component separately, despite their historical relationship under colonialism. This study proposes an interpretive urban heritage analysis at the conceptual level, in which colonial heritage and kampungs are mutually complementary in understanding the city’s memory and Surabaya’s historical identity. Based on Aldo Rossi’s Theory of the Urban Artifact, we studied three colonial areas of Surabaya: Kota Lama, Tunjungan, and Darmo. The interpretative analysis problematized the hierarchical social structure imposed on the urban form, highlighting the disparity between the colonial settlements and the kampungs. However, both elements also demonstrated to coexist in the same urban space, forming a hybrid heritage of two different societies and a memory that persists to this day. The interpretation also acknowledged the lack of a comprehensive heritage management in Surabaya that includes both components, avoiding the prioritization of colonial heritage over kampungs. The study positions itself as an interpretative framework for rethinking the concept of heritage in Surabaya as a hybridity, with direct implications for urban heritage management, postcolonialism, and critical heritage studies.

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between cosmopolitanism, heritage, and authenticity in Oman, focusing on Afro-Omani musical and ritual traditions and in particular on the genre of lēwa. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with musicians, heritage officials, archivists, and community elders, alongside participant observation and archival analysis, it argues that cosmopolitanism has not corroded tradition in Oman. Rather, long histories of Indian Ocean mobility and cultural exchange were among the conditions through which Omani tradition took shape. The article introduces the concept of cosmopolitan authenticity to describe traditions whose legitimacy emerges through historically normalised exchange rather than through cultural purity. By tracing the origins, performance contexts, and current heritage status of lēwa, it shows how a genre shaped by East African and Baloch connections has been absorbed into Omani social life and national heritage discourse as an authoritative expression of local tradition. A further strand of the argument concerns the interaction between community practice and official heritage institutions: tradition is made neither by communities alone nor by state frameworks alone, but in the negotiated space between them. The findings bear on cosmopolitanism studies, critical heritage studies, and scholarship on the western Indian Ocean world.

ABSTRACT Afro-Ecuadorian women from Esmeraldas (northwest Ecuador) live in a complex context of systemic racism and deterritorialisation resulting from escalating social violence, land grabbing and various forms of unsustainable natural resource extraction. However, it is important not to frame them as victims of their circumstances; therefore, this article draws on decolonial, feminist research centring Afro-Ecuadorian women’s exploration of their intangible cultural heritage. In doing so, we address gaps in the field of critical heritage studies that has largely focused on tangible heritage; the global North; and/or Indigenous populations to the detriment of other marginalised groups. We critically analyse how Afro-Ecuadorian women’s narratives of ancestrality, everyday practices and collective knowledge emphasise their intimate connections to territory and place, while also incorporating pre-colonial memory. In doing so, we argue that gendered heritage practices and collective memory are intimately connected with Afro-Ecuadorian women’s responses to socio-environmental injustices, and play a vital role in strengthening their resistance.

This study conducts a comparative analysis of the urban regeneration processes in Łódź, Poland, and Yazd, Iran. Despite the fact that both cities share a common historical background in textile manufacturing, they are characterised by distinct political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts. This research synthesises the findings of six doctoral papers to explore the values associated with textile manufacturing heritage, the role of post-industrial functions in urban management, and the determinants influencing urban regeneration. The methodology employed semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, complemented by fieldwork and observational analyses of textile manufacturing heritage sites, with a particular emphasis on revitalisation projects. While the Historic Urban Landscape framework examines the principles of spatial integration, the critical heritage studies approach evaluates the representation of heritage and the construction of meaning. By integrating comparative perspectives from Central European and Middle Eastern contexts, this research provides transferable strategies for policymakers, urban planners, and heritage managers aimed at fostering equitable, culturally informed, and sustainable urban transformation within industrial districts.

ABSTRACT This article examines Twiza, a traditional Amazigh practice of collective labor, as a gendered moral and social infrastructure in the Gheris oasis of southeastern Morocco. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Goulmima between July and August 2023, the study approaches Twiza not as a residual cultural tradition but as a historically layered system through which cooperation, authority, and social obligation are continuously produced and reconfigured. Combining feminist anthropology, moral economy, and critical heritage studies, the article traces the transformation of Twiza from a vernacular mode of governance embedded in the tajmaʿt into a dispersed and increasingly informal set of practices shaped by colonial juridification, postcolonial bureaucratization, and socio-economic change. Particular attention is given to women’s domestic Twiza, especially collective couscous making and oral performance, as resilient infrastructures of social reproduction that sustain communal life under conditions of institutional erosion and ecological scarcity. The analysis shows that rather than disappearing, collective labor has been redistributed into gendered and less visible social domains, where cooperation persists through affective, moral, and symbolic economies. By foregrounding women’s labor, voice, and everyday cooperation, the article reframes Twiza as a living form of intangible cultural heritage and proposes a relational understanding of resilience grounded in ordinary practices of care, reciprocity, and endurance.

ABSTRACT This article examines the Philippine Regional Exposition of 1895, held in Manila during the final years of Spanish colonial rule, as a space in which multiple colonial and decolonial futures were imagined. By focusing on the concept of ‘futurity’, we analyse how Spanish authorities sought to represent the Philippines as a dynamic site of colonial modernity, while exploring how the exposition expressed possibilities for alternative futures. Using a Critical Heritage Studies framework, we demonstrate how the exposition's infrastructure, exhibits, and spatial organisation were curated to project a European future for the archipelago, emphasising technological and cultural innovation. However, this vision coexisted with participants' clear decolonial aspirations, expressed both in intellectual discourses and public spaces. These alternative futures, shaped by Filipino intellectuals and within the context of emerging revolutionary movements, challenge traditional narratives of colonial power and offer new insights into decolonisation in the Philippines. Our analysis of the exposition highlights the importance of exhibitions as sites of contested heritage, where multiple imagined futures intersect. We conclude by arguing that heritage practices in such expositions not only preserved the past, but shaped and articulated complex visions of the immediate future, offering rich ground for further inquiry into coloniality, resistance, and futurity.

ABSTRACT This article examines the spiritual–ecological system of agrarian Ladakh through a multi-archival, hermeneutic analysis. It interprets Ladakhi agriculture not merely as a subsistence economy but as a historically sedimented system of cosmological negotiation, ecological adaptation, and socio-ritual organisation. Drawing on frameworks of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS), Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and Spiritual Ecology (SE), the article foregrounds how ritualised agricultural initiation, calendrical coordination, and hydraulic cooperation cohere within a moral ecology populated by Yul Lha, Sa bDag, kLu/lu, and Chös sKyong. Methodologically, the article uses text-based cultural hermeneutics and digital visual ethnography to interpret ceremonial timing, propitiatory rites, labour-sharing systems (Pha sPun), and cultural symbols such as the shöl plough and the ibex talisman. The findings indicate that, despite mechanisation, commodification, and demographic out-migration, ritual temporality, moralised hydraulic commoning, and reciprocal landscape governance continue to support ecological resilience. Adaptive tactics such as ritual compression, ceremony relocation to monastic courtyards, legacy festivalisation, and digital mediation of ritual knowledge all reflect deliberate re-articulation rather than abandonment of holy agro-ecology. The article thus contributes to scholarship on spiritual ecology, Himalayan environmental humanities, and critical heritage studies, offering culturally embedded insight for sustainability praxis under conditions of climate instability and socio-economic transition.

Abstract This article examines heritage-led urban transformation in Bursa, Turkey, as a contested process through which space, memory, and justice are actively produced. As a former imperial capital that later emerged as a major center of Republican-era industrialization, Bursa provides a critical case for analyzing how post-imperial urban identities are selectively reconstructed under contemporary heritage governance frameworks. Drawing on an integrated analytical lens that brings together Lefebvre’s production of space, Halbwachs’ politics of collective memory, and Harvey’s concept of spatial justice, the study investigates how imperial, religious, rural, and industrial pasts are differentially mobilized and valued. Focusing on key sites—the Hanlar District, Ulu Mosque, and Cumalıkızık village—and juxtaposing them against the Merinos Woolen Factory, the article demonstrates how UNESCO designation and neoliberal heritage policies foreground monumental Ottoman legacies while marginalizing and sanitizing Republican-era industrial heritage and everyday urban practices. Based on visual, spatial, and policy-based sources, the analysis reveals how heritage governance reshapes urban space through processes of commodification, selective remembrance, and symbolic exclusion. By foregrounding the tensions between preservation, modernization, and social equity, the article contributes to critical heritage studies and broader debates on urban memory and spatial justice in post-imperial cities shaped by global heritage regimes.

ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of World Heritage and Indigenous self-determination through the case of the Ifugao Rice Terraces, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Cordillera region of the Philippines. While World Heritage designation affirms the global significance of Indigenous heritage, it often imposes state-centric and expert-driven frameworks that marginalise local perspectives. Drawing on ethnography, discourse analysis, and reflexive positioning, the article analyses two debates: the contested chronology of the rice terraces and the state-led conservation initiative. These debates illustrate how Indigenous peoples strategically navigate heritage discourses – at times reinforcing authorised framings to gain resources and recognition, and at other times challenging them to assert rights and decolonial aspirations. By foregrounding the ambivalence, fluidity, and multi-vocality in heritage-making, the article contributes to Critical Heritage Studies by highlighting the complex interplay between the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) and Indigenous heritage practices. It frames heritage engagement as a spectrum of negotiation and appropriation, highlighting heritage as a dynamic practice marked by tension and creativity. The article highlights how heritage functions both as a contested arena and as a platform for asserting self-determination, where Indigenous peoples reclaim history and challenge state-led development agendas amid ongoing coloniality and state control.

Rural heritage villages in China face compounding pressures from heritagisation policies, tourism marketisation, and digital platform logics, which together threaten the cultural integrity of lineage-based communities. While existing scholarship has shifted from treating authenticity as a fixed property to viewing it as a negotiated construct, a critical gap persists: the literature does not explain how local actors operationally manage the simultaneous demands of external governance compliance and internal cultural continuity. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography conducted across ritual spaces, tourism settings, and digital platforms in Huizhou lineage villages (March–August 2025)—including over 30 h of in-depth interviews with 18 cultural practitioners and two years of online community ethnography (2023–2025) within Huizhou traditional village cultural liaison groups—this study examines the micro-level strategies through which communities respond to Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD). The study introduces the concept of Versioned Governance: a community-enacted mechanism through which cultural authenticity is strategically differentiated into ritual, performative, and pedagogical versions. Through spatial partitioning, temporal staggering, and linguistic encoding, lineage groups create cultural buffer zones that mediate between sacred practice and public display without compromising ethical coherence. This framework reframes authenticity not as an essential property nor as mere negotiated perception, but as a processual and political achievement—continuously produced through the interplay of structural discipline and local agency. The findings contribute to critical heritage studies and offer practical implications for cultural land-use and heritage governance policy in non-Western rural contexts.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison Museum, a paradigmatic transnational difficult heritage site entwined in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Russian histories. It challenges conventional approaches to contested memory by arguing the museum employs a dual curatorial strategy: deploying a powerful, state-sanctioned patriotic narrative for domestic Chinese audiences, while pragmatically using spatially segregated accommodations for key transnational visitors, notably Koreans. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork (2023–2025), we demonstrate that this dual approach leads visitors primarily to seek affective validation of pre-existing national memories rather than initial learning. This strategy results in ‘managed coexistence’ – a difficult heritage in harmony achieved not through direct dialogue, but strategic narrative and spatial separation. The study contributes significantly to critical heritage studies by 1) questioning oversimplified monolithic views of Chinese difficult heritage, revealing pragmatic institutional negotiations; 2) highlighting segregation as a pivotal, often unacknowledged, curatorial strategy for navigating profound transnational dissonance; and 3) illuminating how memory is managed when direct reconciliation remains elusive, particularly in politically charged post-colonial contexts.

ABSTRACT This article examines archival heritage in peripheral contexts through the Argentine case in order to rethink the relationship between heritage, sovereignty and critique. Drawing on Critical Heritage Studies and Latin American social theory, it argues that recurrent archival discontinuity should not be understood simply as technical failure or institutional weakness. Rather, archival fragility is symptomatic of historically fractured processes of state formation, marked by truncated sovereignty and contested nationhood. In such contexts, archives do not mediate conflict within a consolidated national framework; they materialise the difficulty of constituting that framework in the first place. Through a historical analysis of Argentina’s National Archives, the article shows how archival practices register unresolved struggles over authority, inheritance and historical continuity. Engaging critically with CHS scholarship, it questions the implicit assumption that heritage can function as a unifying dispositif where state authority itself remains unstable. Finally, the article proposes an understanding of critique grounded in divided inheritance: the archive emerges not only as an object of heritage but as a condition of critical knowledge, demanding modes of reading attentive to instability, loss and institutional fracture. In this way, the article contributes to a more situated and reflexive theory of heritage in peripheral contexts.

ABSTRACT This paper explores why and how Western-based sport organisations deal with difficult pasts within sport tourism spaces, specifically at stadiums, tours and museums. As part of a longitudinal international research agenda, in this piece, grounded in the principles of Critical Heritage Studies and structured under a case study methodology, I discuss the politics of remembering and forgetting placed by sport organisations around histories linked to racism, authoritarianism, and human rights abuses. Drawing on diverse contemporary international case studies, it serves as a guide to why and how sport organisations can critically engage with the more painful chapters of their histories, while highlighting the challenges, importance, and benefits of doing so. In addition, this paper sheds light on the role that local cultural, political, and/or economic considerations play in the remembrance and/or suppression of these pasts. Ultimately, it calls for an ethical engagement with difficult heritage, urging sport organisations to embrace their social responsibility and the urgent need to become ‘comfortable with the uncomfortable’.

ABSTRACT Following the celebration in 2023 of the most significant material symbol of Shakespeare, the First Folio, this article acknowledges the ways heritage institutions and the material culture they curate have shaped and maintained the narrative of Shakespeare’s legacy. It asks how his cultural significance was represented in the year of the First Folio’s 400th anniversary in light of pivotal events since the 2016 commemoration of 400 years since Shakespeare’s death: in particular, the anti-racism protests that peaked in 2020 and led cultural institutions around the world to reconsider their interpretation of historical figures with associations with imperialism, prompting anti-racism statements from many. Through its case studies on the State Library of New South Wales’s and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s First Folio exhibitions, this article explores the implications of space, place, and the cultural narratives that are invoked to tell the relative stories of Shakespeare’s significance in the two institutions: highlighting the innovative and the traditional. It brings Global Shakespeare studies into conversation with critical heritage studies to explore the implications of Shakespeare as heritage and seek opportunities for new cultural narratives that no longer rely on the exclusionary and harmful notion of universality and inherent cultural supremacy.

In the thunderous echo of zapateado (rapid footwork) against marble floors of banks and the mournful wail of cante jondo (lit. deep song) in reclaimed public squares, flamenco transcends dance to become an act of defiance against commodification and institutional constraints. Emerging from Spain’s margins in the late eighteenth century, flamenco embodies Roma resilience, Andalusian struggle, and an enduring contestation of authority. While UNESCO’s designation of flamenco as Intangible Cultural Heritage imposes an authorised heritage discourse, read as a performative script that dictates what flamenco “is” and “is not,” grassroots protest movements challenge this rigidity through impromptu performances in financial institutions and public spaces. Through a case study of the flamenco protest movement Flo6x8, this article explores how it contests power hierarchies through spatial intervention, reimagined letras (short verse in flamenco song), and the adaptation of traditional forms to contemporary issues. Combining insights from critical heritage studies, critical legal theory, and performance studies, it argues that flamenco functions both as a jurisprudence of movement – an embodied, spatialised critique of institutional authority – and as an act of jurisgenesis that generates new legal meaning from below. The article highlights how Flo6X8 aligns with broader questions of how law and dance intersect in performance, activism, and spatial production. It concludes that flamenco is not merely dance or song but a reclamation of justice and a disruption of authorised heritage discourse. In doing so, flamenco refuses categorisation, reasserting itself as a practice of resistance and dissent.

ABSTRACT This article combines interdisciplinary child studies with critical heritage studies to fill a gap in research about the practices of documenting aftermaths of violence and terrorism. It asks how the police and police work are produced in young people’s responses to acts of terror. Focusing on the documentation in four Stockholm-based museums of the 2017 truck attack in Sweden’s capital, I analyse young people’s narratives preserved in three collections and one exhibition. Expressing gratitude and praising the police for their service is a clear theme across the narratives, yet police work and counter-terrorism appear as mystifying and largely unknown. Young people visually document participating in the practices, widespread at the time, of giving flowers to officers and placing flowers on police cars. These can be seen as gratitude practices as well as strategies for domesticating the police force and producing it as safer and more approachable. The article positions the self-initiated narratives as important documents of young people’s emotional experiences and their notions of safety and threat in the aftermath of an emergency.

This article examines how Vietnamese Áo Dài motifs-understood as cloth-based, lived cultural heritage-are being reconfigured through processes of digitization and cultural traceability. Rather than treating digital technologies as neutral tools of preservation, the study conceptualizes traceability as a socio-cultural practice through which authorship, authenticity, and value are negotiated within contemporary textile cultures. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Áo Dài artisans, designers, historians, and cultural technologists (n = 17), supported by document analysis and an illustrative pilot study of ten Đông Hồ–derived motifs, the article develops a Four-Layer Cultural Traceability Model grounded in empirical material. The model frames traceability as emerging from cultural data practices, provenance attribution, user interpretation, and value negotiation, rather than as a purely technical system. Findings indicate that stakeholders view digitization simultaneously as a means of safeguarding symbolic meaning and as a site of tension related to commodification, intellectual property, and unequal access to digital infrastructure. By reframing traceability as an interpretive and ethical process embedded in textile practice, the study contributes to debates in textile and fashion studies, critical heritage studies, and digital humanities.

The question of how to deal with photographs from the colonial period and photographic archives is one of the most pertinent in the fields of art history, critical museology and critical heritage studies today. This article approaches these issues by focusing on the role of photography in a novel. It discusses Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019), highlighting intersections between photography, literature, history and memory; interrelations between histories of photography, violence and war; histories of Italian colonialism and the military occupation of Ethiopia. And it pays particular attention to the role of women in these regards. While much emphasis has rightly been given to questions of the restitution of cultural belongings and ancestral remains, this article approaches the issue of photographs and photographic archives, as well as Mengiste’s written photographs, through the lens of the ‘restitution of dignity’, a concept discussed by the Savvy Contemporary collective in 2022.