Wednesday, 23 April 2025
11.00-12.00 BST – Zoom Webinar (Register via Eventbrite here)
Traces of Empire in Urban Heritage
Dr Rosie Spooner, Lecturer in Information Studies
School of Humanities, University of Glasgow
In recent years, there has been renewed interest in walking across the arts, humanities and social sciences. While diverse in its aims and approaches, the politics of space and the ethics of taking up space are of critical importance, with scholars examining issues such as accessibility, climate change, land rights and sovereignty, and commemoration, remembrance and silence through the elementary, which is not to say universal, act of walking. This paper brings these concerns into dialogue with critical heritage studies, establishing a discursive field at the intersection of scholarship on walking, memory, heritage and public history. This is done through discussing an ongoing socially-engaged research project that centres on creating, leading and evaluating historical walking tours and self-guided trails focused on elucidating traces of empire embedded in the urban landscape. Conceived as practice research, these activities aim to interweave under-represented histories – specifically histories of slavery, colonialism and imperialism – into dominant heritage discourses, and through such an intervention lay bare the dissonance between presence and absence that underpins constructions and expressions of heritage. Thus, walking is used as a means of not only uncovering how slavery, colonialism and imperialism shaped the urban environment, a history that is seemingly “hidden”, but also interrogating the process through which civic memory is forged and maintained, inevitably resulting in gaps, slippages and erasures.
Rosie Spooner
Rosie Spooner is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work sits at the intersection of history, museum and heritage studies, cultural studies and public humanities. Trained as a cultural historian of the British Empire, her research concerns the history, theory and practice of museums and other memory institutions within an imperial context and the contemporary legacies of these entanglements. She is particularly interested in the role of the past in the production of power, identity, memory and place. She is Lecturer in Information Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow, where she is core academic faculty for the Museum Studies postgraduate programme.
