Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage

Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage (AAFH) is an interdisciplinary research programme which aims to develop a broad, international and cross-sectoral comparative framework for understanding 'heritage' in its most expansive sense. While heritage has tended to be strictly defined, it is possible to argue that all areas of practice that are informed by notions of endangerment, caring for the future, or which involve the 'presencing' of the past, might be considered to be forms of heritage work. Further, 'natural' and 'cultural' and 'intangible' and 'tangible' heritage have tended to be treated in isolation from one another, when, in fact, the distinction between these realms is often difficult to maintain. Accordingly, this research programme will explore the processes and practices by which heritage is 'assembled' within a broad range of fields which have typically not been conceptualised as forms of heritage, and consider the ways in which the alternative practices and processes of future-making involved in each might inform more conventional aspects of cultural heritage designation, care and management. It will do this through investigating and providing opportunities for knowledge exchange between and across a series of different heritage domains. In so doing, the research programme aims to facilitate a more democratic and informed dialogue between and across various heritage 'industries' and their publics in the twenty-first century, and to contribute to the development of new policies which promote more innovative, shared, resilient and sustainable approaches to heritage conservation. Activities will take place across four work packages, each of which draws together several heritage domains that share common objectives or common practices, but which have not generally been considered in comparative perspective, to examine the ways in which each domain draws on the past to resource the future in the face of future threat. The collection of domains to be considered by the programme are organised under four broad themes: "preparing for uncertain futures" (WP1), to investigate the selection of sites for future disposal of nuclear waste, the transmission of messages from earth into outer space and practices of world heritage designation and management; "managing nature/culture borderlands" (WP2), to explore synergies between landscape rewilding initiatives and the management of ruination in built heritage; "curating profusion" (WP3), to examine discarding and keeping for posterity in households and small-to-medium-sized museums; and "conserving diversity" (WP4), to compare ways of valuing and managing biological and cultural diversity in indigenous landscape management, seed banks, herbaria and frozen zoos. Within these WPs, researchers will undertake fieldwork to understand the practices and processes which are undertaken within each domain, and to suggest ways in which they might be creatively re-deployed in others. Research methods will principally draw on forms of visual and material ethnography, but also incorporate documentary research, creative artistic practice, film making, trans-sectoral knowledge exchange events and exhibitionary experiments. In addition to these WP-specific activities, we will engage in a number of cross-cutting, programme-wide activities which are concerned with co-creating new knowledge through knowledge exchange events, academic symposia and exhibitions. We will work with 18 non-academic partner organisations drawn from across various conventional and unconventional heritage domains. We are guided in our work by an esteemed advisory board drawn from senior representatives of a number of our partner organisations, representing a range of different fields of practice, to ensure our research has wide impact amongst practitioners and policy makers.