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 the themes of Equality and Inclusion, Sustainable Places, and Storytelling.

Some recent projects have explored the ethics of participation in intangible cultural heritage across Europe, using ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and creative theatre and sound; working with the cultural sector in Cornwall to produce a Cornish Audio-Visual Archive Charter; and surfacing the plurality of stories within a National Trust coastal landscape to advance inclusion, using critical discourse analysis, walking interviews and experimental film.