Centre for Heritage, Culture & Society

Centre overview

Heritage is not history; rather, it is the way that current societies make sense of the past in the present and carry it into the future. Heritage is therefore not objective fact, but is linked with its meanings, uses and manifestations in society. So, where there is heritage there are people - creating, interpreting, storytelling, preserving, safeguarding, communicating – different aspects of memory, place and identity.  

Research shows that engaging with heritage can have tremendously positive effects on sense of place and identity, community cohesion and wellbeing. But heritage can also be linked to divisiveness and exclusion or become fragmented or lost as it is shaped by social or natural forces.
 
A ‘critical’ approach to heritage recognises that ‘heritage’ can mean different things to different people, and that it does not operate in isolation but is a part of society and imbricated with other aspects of culture. Applying our thinking about these issues to real-world challenges, we seek to enable impactful research to usefully understand the way these processes and effects of heritage work in and on society.

The Centre for Heritage, Culture & Society works with an applied, critical lens to explore ways to ensure that the benefits of engaging with cultural heritage can be accessed, experienced, and enjoyed by all. Our scope includes tangible and intangible cultural heritage as well as cultural landscapes. The word ‘culture’ in our title acknowledges that heritage does not sit in isolation but is a part of everyday life and linked with other practices and performances that are not to do with the past – but the use of the past in the present is our main focus via three main research clusters: 

• Critical Heritage Geographies: Projects in this cluster focus on socio-spatial aspects of intangible and tangible heritage. They take a critical approach to analyse how and where people engage with heritage and cultural landscapes, and with each other, considering different meanings, values, and uses of heritage and how these align with or counter social, cultural, and political forces.Projects’ impact is oriented towards benefits to social justice, societal cohesion, and human-environment relations.  
• Place and Plurality: Places contain multiple ‘constellations’ (Massey 2005) of human and non-human stories that have amassed over time. These can shape identities, memories, and ways of dwelling (Ingold 1993); but while some stories and practices are visible, others are hidden or forgotten. Projects in this cluster focus on these traces, narrating those present and surfacing the absent. They consider past and present social practices but also the more-than-human, ask how memories are held and shaped in and by particular places, and uncover new stories and relations within them. Impact is geared to benefitting policies on place-making, community planning, and other social and environmental contexts.  
• Archives and Oral Histories: The past is preserved and transmitted through artefacts and records gathered in particular contexts and under particular conditions. Projects in this theme explore existing records and create new ones. They do not focus on what they tell us about the past, but on what past values and meanings can tell us about present cultures, societies, and practices. Impacts include benefits to social justice (including decolonising approaches), archive and museum policy and practice. 

If your research aligns with critical heritage but doesn’t fit into these themes, please do get in touch.

We welcome expressions of interest in collaborating from external partners around any of these themes: please get in touch research@falmouth.ac.uk