https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1180-3784
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ABSTRACT
In this article we explore how heritage can contribute to the climate discussion in ways beyond the protection and preservation of historical sites, environments, and intangible heritage. We introduce how heritage can be used as a study, or tool, to tackle global challenges and institutional barriers. Heritage studies can reveal wider values which have contributed towards the crisis we now face in the Anthropocene, but also potentially provide critical tools for action to address these challenges. We highlight the parallels between the heritage and climate narrative through their future-making approaches as well as the authorised discourse that underpins them. The article explores critical heritage studies and practices alongside the current saliency in the climate discourse with the aim to evoke climate action based on principles of care and shared agency.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
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26. See Latour, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’; Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’.
27. Morton, T., Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
28. For further in-depth discussion of heritage as a hyperobject, see Oud Ammerveld, Janna (forthcoming), What does climate change change? Understanding climate change as a hyperobject in the work of heritage policy makers in England and Sweden. PhD Thesis, Institute of Archaeology, UCL, London.
29. Sklair, ‘Sleepwalking through the Anthropocene’.
30. Suzie Thomas et al., ‘Dark Heritage’, 2019.
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32. DeLanda, Assemblage Theory; DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society.
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37. Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.
38. Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Pg 21.
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42. Ellis et al., ‘People Have Shaped Most of Terrestrial Nature for at Least 12,000 Years’.
43. Crumley, C., ‘New Paths into the Anthropocene: Applying Historical Ecologies to the Human Future’.
44. Brit Solli et al., ‘Some Reflections on Heritage and Archaeology in the Anthropocene’.
45. ‘The Cadence of Climate: Heritage Proxies and Social Change’.
46. Boccardi ‘From Mitigation to Adaptation: A New Heritage Paradigm for the Anthropocene’.
47. Palsson et al., ‘Reconceptualizing the “Anthropos”. See also Brewer and Riede, ‘Cultural Heritage and Climate Adaptation: A Cultural Evolutionary Perspective for the Anthropocene’.
48. Zeldin-O’Neill, ‘“It’s a Crisis, Not a Change”: The Six Guardian Language Changes on Climate Matters’. Also, the four stages are adopted by Stanley Cohen’s stages of denial.
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50. Madhavan et al., Practicing Sustainability. Pg 37.
51. Cairney, The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making.
52. Inspired by Leverhulme Trust project, Making Science Public. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/sociology/research/projects/making-science-public/index.aspx
53. The IPCC is a United Nations intergovernmental body set up to provide regular scientific assessments on climate change. See http://www.ipcc.chformoreinformation. for more information.
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73. Ibid.
74. John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, The Politics of the Anthropocene, 2019.
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Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Hana Morel
Hana Morel is the Sustainability Manager for MOLA’s Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network, CITiZAN. Previously, she worked as Senior Policy Advisor (Climate Change) at Historic England (2020–21), and postdoctoral Research Associate for the AHRC Heritage Priority Area (2017–2020). She developed the one-year follow on funding project, Opening New Pathways to Impact across Heritage Research, Policy and Practice, which built on her work in the AHRC Heritage Priority Area to transform and increase understanding of policies’ impact on the heritage sector. Hana was awarded her PhD from University College London in 2015 where she researched the development of planning policy and archaeology in global cities and its impact on archaeology and heritage practice. Previous roles include work as researcher of international and domestic policy for Bournemouth University’s Pro-Vice Chancellor (Global Engagement); archaeologist, researcher and lead for community engagement at Izmit’s Nicomedia Project, Turkey; project manager of the NYC Heritage Project supported by the Landmark Preservation Commission, New York; and editor-in-chief of the journal Papers from the Institute of Archaeology.
Hana’s areas of interest include urban archaeology, planning, and exploring the role of heritage critically alongside global and domestic agendas, and its contribution towards addressing global challenges (with particular focus on climate action). She is also working as Climate Heritage Specialist with ICOMOS, and sits on various UK heritage and archaeology groups such as APPAG, TAF, and RESCUE among others.
Janna oud Ammerveld
Janna oud Ammerveld is a CHEurope Marie Skłodowska-Curie Trainee at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Her PhD research, titled ‘What does climate change?’, focuses on the impact of climate change’s presence as a hyperobject on the work of heritage policymakers in England and Sweden. For her PhD she has worked with Historic England and the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet) to study their work and responses to and in a changing climate, while also questioning our understanding of heritage in the zeitgeist of the Anthropocene.
She obtained both her MA and BA in conservation studies from the University of Antwerp. After 4 years of treating wooden and ethnographic objects from private and public collections, she found her interest in the theoretical realms of heritage and its uses and potential via her master dissertation. This work focused on the application of Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory in understanding the controversies around the Dutch celebration of St Nicholas (Sinterklaas).