Introduction: tools for a critical heritage

This collection engages with heritage studies at a dynamic moment in the development of the field. It builds on longstanding trends toward a more expansive understanding of heritage values and, consequently, a move toward more inclusive decision-making and resource management (Lipe 1984; Watkins 2000; De la Torre 2002, Walker and Marquis-Kyle 2004). Furthermore, the growing body of critical heritage studies not only interrogates the systems of power implicated in heritage practices, but demonstrates the potential of deploying tangible and intangible heritage to address historical and systemic inequalities as a social activist strategy (Janes and Conaty 2005; Smith 2006; Sandell 2007; Byrne 2008; Dwyer and Alderman 2008; Harrison 2010). While the change in heritage practices may seem disconcertingly slow, governmental agencies and non-governmental organisations are being increasingly held accountable to be more transparent and to recognise the multivalence of heritage for diverse communities and stakeholders. Scholars working in contexts such as archives, libraries, museums, historical societies, archaeological collections, monuments, and heritage sites have identified the ways in which heritage is used to both perpetuate and resist social inequalities. By thus exposing the fields of power in which heritage operates, scholars and practitioners alike are challenging traditional models with practices that reflects the needs, interests, and values of communities, particularly those who have been historically marginalised and effaced (ex. Barton and Leonard 2010; Simon 2010; Adair, Filene, and Koloski 2011; Sandell and Nightingale 2012; Roued-Cunliffe and Copeland 2017). In short, we are in the midst of a transformation of the field from expert-driven to participatory heritage that recognises multiple forms of knowledge and epistemologies and that invites community-curated content and decision-making.

All of these efforts to create a more democratised, inclusive, activist approach require not only a paradigm shift from top-down, officially-sanctioned notions of heritage, but also methodologies that support this kind of practice. This collection of case studies that document a range of tools developed to further a more democratised approach to heritage stems from a session at the 2016 Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference in Montreal. Using diverse disciplinary perspectives and a variety of methodologies, the authors explore examples which privilege the political and phenomenological concerns of diverse stakeholders in a wide variety of geographic, institutional, and cultural contexts. They reveal complex and often contested paradigms of value that different groups bring to public heritage and memory practices, and they interrogate them with attention to their contextual fields of power.

The seven papers focus on case studies from around the world: Australia, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.  Four of the papers examine heritage in museum contexts. Sheila Watson shares the complex political and ideological choices facing those planning a new National Museum of Romanian Communism in Bucharest and investigates the implications of using heritage for reconciliation in a country still grappling with its history of authoritarian regimes. Lianne McTavish explores the complex curatorial voices and target audiences in a rural, grassroots museum which uses taxidermied gophers in vignettes to both celebrate and critique local history. Rachael Coghlan shares the lessons learned from an experimental interactive exhibit deploying techniques of civic conversation at the Museum of Democracy in Australia’s seat of national government. Jane Legget’s study of managing material culture and Indigenous knowledge held within institutions in New Zealand explores the efficacy of performance indicators as tools for ensuring Maori perspectives are reflected in museum assessments.Three of the papers examine the operations of heritage curated by citizens in community contexts. Rachael Kiddey explores the efficacy of empowering people living homeless through participation in and the interpretation of their archaeological heritage in Bristol, England. Anne Pyburn reflects on her participatory action research in Kyrgyzstan recognising both the ways the country’s diverse cultural history has been shaped by competing political agendas and at the local level describing how archaeologists, educators, and citizens are engaging in the preservation and interpretation of Kyrgyz heritage. Kryder-Reid, Foutz, Wood, and Zimmerman use an array of methods including discourse analysis, focus groups, and survey research to map stakeholder-defined notions of heritage of two contested sites in central Indiana and to locate those sites within the broader discourse of settler colonial ideologies and contemporary politics.

At the same time these seven papers consider the politics of heritage from a stakeholder perspective, they also point to new approaches, strategies, and methodologies that offer tools for empowering an inclusive, shared authority approach to heritage sites and collections. Kiddey and Pyburn take a participatory action research approach that in many ways problematises the assumptions of shared authority as much as it exemplifies their unique interventions. Legget and Kryder-Reid et al. use qualitative and quantitative social science methodologies to understand stakeholder-defined values and culturally-specific paradigms of meaning. McTavish, Watson, and Coghlan approach their projects as museum ethnographers. McTavish deconstructs an idiosyncratic exhibit with a deep reading of its representation of history and identity viewed through the lens of its small town rural context. Watson’s ethnography examines the process of framing a national narrative and theorises the process of creating emotional communities within the context of healing and reconciliation in Romania’s post-authoritarian regimes. Coghlan’s contribution explores a museum’s efforts to build more democratic participatory elements into a traditional exhibit format. In addressing the complicated institutional constraints of a museum dedicated to democracy she highlights the challenges of implementing the principles of stakeholder-defined values and shared authority.

As a collection, these studies not only exemplify a range of methodologies, but also humanise the concept of heritage to assert the agency of diverse stakeholders in creatively and intentionally resisting the politics of the heritage industry and profession. In their diverse settings, these cases studies document citizens, activists, and community members creating their own meaning, reframing narratives, altering knowledge production, and reconfiguring social relations. The authors highlight innovative strategies for navigating structures of power embedded in the mainstream heritage practices and producing counternarratives both with and without the support of dominant institutions. They explore methodologies and analytical tools for mapping and understanding the fields of power implicated in the democratising of knowledge that a shared authority model espouses. They also raise issues of the role of the heritage professional, both as broker in the context of contested heritage and as activist scholar committed to advocacy and engaged in using heritage as a tool for social justice.

The conversation implied among these papers raises a number of issues for implementing critical heritage studies not simply as a cultural analysis paradigm, but as a mandate for change in the field. It highlights the challenges of employing models of shared authority and community-curated content within the pragmatic and logistical constraints of funding, governance, and legal structures. The case studies demonstrate the complex and often intransigent competing interests in heritage management decisions, whether those pitting local citizens’ needs against officially sanctioned state-sponsored mandates or audiences’ desires over institutional interests. The papers also present a sobering look at the intensive investment participatory heritage practices require. The adage that at the heart of collaboration is ‘labour’ is manifest in Pyburn’s long-term embedded work in Kyrgyzstan that is only beginning to point toward systemic change and also in Legget’s review of the decades’ long process of including Maori perspectives in museum planning, management, and evaluation in New Zealand. Kiddey’s project is similarly compelling in the inclusion of some of society’s most marginalised as active participants in the archaeology of their own homeless heritage, and yet it cannot be said to have substantively changed the conditions of those living homeless or attitudes of the broader community. Coghlan, Watson, and Kryder-Reid et al. each document the degree to which even elaborate exhibitionary strategies, museum planning processes, and visitor studies research can fall short of effectively engaging diverse constituencies in democratised heritage practices in meaningful ways.

At the same time, the studies also represent a slow but encouraging shift of participatory heritage from the margins of activist scholarship into an adoption of inclusion as a core value in the mainstream heritage industry. To realise the fullest potential of this paradigm change, however, the field must continue to develop efficient and effective strategies for involving a wide range of constituencies in dialogue about the value of heritage and vesting them with decision-making powers.