Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.
Thank you to all who attended our March 14th Workshop, the above image lends some insight into our follow-up discussions about it. All in all we found it a be productive event that raised two prominent themes:
Land Conceptualisation & Use: Cultural heritage is not only about preserving physical spaces but about understanding and negotiating the meanings attached to them. We explored how landscapes become heritage through claims of cultural ownership (de Maaker), how long-inhabited sites are framed as historical resources (Mijers & Geber), and how governance structures can shape local heritage from the ground up (Tartera). These discussions highlighted the complex processes through which communities attribute significance to their environments, transforming them into sources of social capital that enhance well-being and cohesion. They also emphasised how acts of contestation and stewardship continuously reshape both spatial and material heritage, prompting reconsideration of museum practices and collections.
Researcher Roles in Cultural Heritage: Our discussions wove together the evolving position of researchers—from detached observers to active participants to mediatory instruments. We considered how heritage is co-produced through collaboration (Mijers & Geber), how guiding practices sustain historical knowledge (Chai), how researchers can become active agents in valorising heritage (de Maaker), and how participation itself can risk becoming an end rather than a means (Skeate & Thomas). These conversations raised questions about authorship, responsibility, and the power dynamics that shape heritage work, underscoring the need to navigate the fine line between participation and imposition.
Taken together, these discussions reinforced the idea that heritage is not simply preservation but enmeshed lived experiences. Across different contexts, we saw how cultural heritage can include, exclude, impel purpose, and spur collective agency—whether through guiding, storytelling, analysis, congregating, or ingrained tactics of informal governance. This shifts the focus from heritage as a static entity to heritage as an active, negotiated process, one that communities mobilise to sustain themselves and strengthen social bonds. And one, we as researchers can and should incorporate into our field.
Special Thanks: to Candace Thomas, who joined in from outside the Una network to discuss her research and insight in the context of TRT3’s theme. Candace is a PhD candidate in Sociology at University College Dublin, who joined Graham for an interesting back-and-forth on participation in the context of his work, which involves the longstanding placemaking of Candace’s Showpeople community in Glasgow.
You can read some of Candace’s very topical work here, as well as here.
Seed-Funding Segment Recap: The 2022 TRT3 survey underscored the need for debate, knowledge exchange, and collaboration among doctoral candidates. Key priorities included seminars, workshops, fieldwork-based projects, and partnerships with heritage professionals. There was strong interest in joint-initiatives that actively involve researchers in shaping case studies and building networks.
To build on this momentum, we invite further input on potential joint-initiatives, funding strategies, and next steps. If you have ideas or would like to contribute, please send them to Graham Skeate (g.skeate@sms.ed.ac.uk), and please feel free to mark-up and alter this text itself so we can incrementally arrive at a definitive document. A central goal of this TRT is to generate content, so contribute however suits you: photos, documents, emailed comments, audio recordings, social media posts. No need for tailored, edited or precious contributions at this point—participation is most important.
Join us for Una Europa’s Cultural Heritage TRT3 (Heritage and Social Capital, Mutuality & Volunteering) Workshop, taking place online on 14 March 2025, from 10:00–13:00 (CET).
We look forward to welcoming you and extend our thanks to those who will be contributing to the workshop: Bowen Chai, Erik de Maaker, Esther Mijers & Jonny Geber, Katarzyna Plebańczyk, Graham Skeate, and Carlos Burgos Tartera. With a variety of themes, disciplines, and research locales, these presentations will offer a range of insight into how social capital, mutuality, and volunteering intersect with the dynamic processes of heritage-making across diverse contexts.
The workshop will follow this structure:
10:00–10:15 | Introduction by TRT3 Researchers
10:15–10:30 | Presentation by Bowen Chai
10:30–10:45 | Presentation by Erik de Maaker
10:45–11:00 | Presentation by Esther Mijers & Jonny Geber
11:00–11:15 | Discussion
11:15–11:30 | Break
11:30–11:45 | Presentation by Katarzyna Plebańczyk
11:45–12:00 | Presentation by Graham Skeate
12:00–12:15 | Presentation by Carlos Burgos Tartera
12:15–12:45 | Discussion
12:45–13:00 | Closing Remarks
The workshop aims to foster an exchange of ideas, explore collaborations, and discuss practicalities such as seed funding within the TRT3 framework. Feel free to be open, expressive, and share the event with others as well.
We look forward to welcoming you to a productive session. Please find bios and abstracts of participants below.
Dynamic Processes of Heritage-Making at the Waterloo Battlefield Bowen Chai, University of Edinburgh & KU Leuven
This research focuses on the Guides 1815 organization. It examines how voluntary participation in heritage preservation fosters both cultural transmission and the creation of social capital, particularly among retirees. The aim is to analyze the intersection of heritage preservation, community formation, and participatory engagement through guiding practices. The study employs ethnographic methods, including participant observation such as shadowing tours and in-depth interviews with guides, to investigate the everyday practices of Guides 1815. Archival research and analysis of museum records will also be incorporated to contextualize the role of the group in heritage-making. A focus will be placed on the group’s history, organizational structure, and the personal and social motivations behind volunteering. This research will highlight how the guides’ involvement in heritage-making creates a sense of purpose, community, and social connectedness, turning the preservation of history into a meaningful social activity. It will demonstrate the potential for heritage to function as a vehicle for social capital, illustrating how cultural engagement can foster collective bonds, emotional connections, and social networks within local communities.
Bowen Chai is a doctoral candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology, currently enrolled in joint PhD programs at KU Leuven and the University of Edinburgh under the Una-Her-Doc framework. With a diverse professional background spanning multiple countries, he has worked with institutions such as the National Museum of China and Memorial Waterloo 1815 in Belgium. Trained at Queen’s University Belfast, Minzu University of China, the University of Oxford, and the University of Cambridge, Bowen’s research examines how heritage practices are shaped and negotiated at the intersection of authority, tourism, and agency.
///////////////////////////
Making Landscapes into Heritage: Framing, Values and Recognition Erik de Maaker, University of Leiden
How can landscapes become cultural heritage? How do they obtain such a label, from who, and what is its impact on the people whose cultural values are invested with such a landscape? These are relevant questions since it is globally becoming increasingly common to recognize landscapes for their cultural significances. This kind of recognition necessarily involves claims to cultural ownership. That is, the significances attached to forests, lakes, rivers and mountain peaks is almost inevitably located with dedicated ethnic or religious communities. For example, the irrigated wet rice fields of Bali, declared UNESCO world Heritage in 2012, are the result of Hindu Balinese channeling spring water from divine sources. Likewise, mount Kanchenjunga in Sikkim (India), the third highest peak of the Himalayan range, received World Heritage recognition for the religious significances it holds to the local Lepcha community. Such landscapes have long histories of inhabitation, but what happens if these become recognized as ‘World Heritage’? In what respects are these adopted in an authorized heritage discourse, and with what consequence? In my presentation I will engage with these questions, arguing for the necessity to with various stakeholders research the opportunities such processes of heritage-making can entail, the consequences these can have, as well as the resistances these may give rise to.
Erik de Maaker is Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. His thematic focus is on the social constitution of values, objects and places, and their relevance in terms of ethnicity, indigeneity, heritage, environment and religion, mainly in upland South and Southeast Asia. He is currently leading a 5-year research project focusing on how appreciations of heritage can inform notions of sustainability in the eastern Himalayas. Orcid ID: 0000-0001-6371-1297
///////////////////////////
Belmont @ 80: Heritage and Memory of a Plantation in a Grenadian Community Esther Mijers & Jonny Geber, University of Edinburgh
This project investigates the relationship between history, heritage, memory and identity, in collaboration with the Belmont Estate, Grenada. As an uninterrupted working estate since the late seventeenth century, it offers a unique perspective on Grenada’s history. Engaging local volunteers, we focus on the people of Belmont over its centuries-long history, and their heritage, to establish a local knowledge bank and resource centre for public use. As such, B@80 is a microstudy of the history and heritage of Grenada and other Windward Islands in the Caribbean. With the community, we co-created a methodology and developed training to record oral history, material culture and the historical landscape to make this available to the public. Ultimately B@80 seeks to develop a heritage framework from which stakeholders in Grenada can gather, develop and expand knowledge of the past and secure it for future generations. Aligning with SDG 16, this project plays an important role in the decolonising agenda and fosters a pathway to increased social justice and welfare. It aids Belmont to enhance its importance as a social enterprise in the community and benefits its members economically. Finally, it helps advance sustainable and equal heritage research in Grenada.
Esther Mijers: is a Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. She works on the history of early modern Scotland and its relations with the wider world, including Europe and the Americas. She has published on Scots in the Atlantic and is currently PI on the project ‘Belmont@80: Heritage and memory of a plantation in a Grenadian community’, which is a collaboration between History and Archaeology at Edinburgh and the Belmont estate, Grenada to record and digitise its history and heritage.
Jonny Geber is a bioarchaeologist and historical archaeologist, with a particular research focus on social marginality, poverty and the social archaeology of the subaltern.
///////////////////////////
Investing in the Capital of Individuals and Multiplying It Katarzyna Plebańczyk, Jagiellonian University
The active participation of citizens in public life stems from the heritage and experiences of previous generations. Investing in the capital of individuals and multiplying it for the common good and development, is a driving force for the economy, apart from having a direct impact on personal and social growth. Each individual involved in volunteering is not only acting for the common good but also acquiring new skills and experiences, investing in their own personal growth and multiplying it by supporting others, while also bringing an added value to the functioning of the organisations with which they are collaborating.
The above topic became the subject of the completed research project. The team members worked as volunteers in various initiatives in cultural field and collaborated with the organisations using volunteers. The research focused on main topics: the implementation of volunteering and experiencing volunteering from the volunteer perspective, relationships of volunteer participants. The results of the research project were adapted in the programme of the Małopolska Institute of Culture, the aim of which is to promote “good volunteering/student internships and placements”, among others by focusing on volunteers. The team’s attention is focused on volunteering organizers, such as cultural institutions or universities (student internships), but also on people who want to be volunteers. Meetings, webinars, etc. are held. The challenge is to reach and cooperate with those who influence the negative perception of this type of activity.
Katarzyna Plebańczyk – PhD in the discipline of Management Science, Institute of Culture, Faculty of Management and Social Communication, Jagiellonian University in Kraków (also serving as a student internship coordinator).
Research: CICERONE – Creative Industries Cultural Economy pROduction Network 2019-2023 (Horizon 2020); MC Member in COST Action 1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability 2011-2015; the leader of the Polish team in the project “Local museums and European identities: heritage as a practice of belonging in Europe (MUSEUROPA)” under the UNA EUROPA Seed Funding SF2004. Member of the ISDRS – International Sustainable Development Research Society (including participation in the Mentorship Programme), the Institute for Research on Cultural Organizations, the Commission for Cultural Management of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an advisory team of the National Observatory of Culture.
Research interests: public management, the implementation of sustainable development strategies in the cultural sector, the management of cultural organizations, including topics such as: managing relationships between organizations and stakeholders (especially audiences and volunteers), strategic management, audience development management, human resource management (including creativity and talent management), the role of individuals in management, particularly cultural managers, artistic managers, and artists.
///////////////////////////
Unresolved Aims; Reflections on Participation Graham Skeate, KU Leuven & The University of Edinburgh
Many say heritage is a process—always becoming, never fixed. Yet participatory methods can lean towards determination, as if involving others inevitably draws us closer to understanding heritage and as experiential. But can this pursuit fall into the trap of perfecting the method rather than embracing the contingencies of the process itself?
What if participation focused less on the mechanics of incorporation and more on inhabiting the open-endedness of the process? Rather than treating participation as a means to an outcome—measured or neatly articulated—it could become a practice of attunement to the rhythms of ongoing change. This would privilege presence over precision, where the act of collectivising would allow for entanglements to unfold. This way, participation is not simply about who is involved or how, but how processes generate their own terms unpredictably, through negotiations, gatherings, tangents, refusals, and insights.
This aligns with slowform placemaking, where spaces are shaped by lived practices rather than fixed plans. Cultures around the world form their homes like this, often exemplifying how spaces emerge through adaptive responses to material conditions and social arrangements. Participation in this context means not only observing or intervening but learning to inhabit provisional grounds where open-ended decisions are layered through collective gestures, habits, and shared understandings. What if intentional forms of participation were to resist resolution, embracing the fertile disquiet of not knowing where a process might lead? And what if this could remind researchers that most subjects already have sophisticated methods of participation that might be the wiser shepherd for collaboration?
Graham Skeate is an Una-Her-Doc from the second cohort. He has a background in poetry, architectural conservation, and fine arts. His work is a collaboration with Glasgow’s Showpeople, focusing on the interplay of their social arrangements via the network of yards they have built throughout Glasgow.
/////////////////////
Transnational Heritage Governance in Mountain Regions Carlos Burgos Tartera, University of Madrid & University of Bologna
My aim and intended contributions to TRT3 focus on exploring governance structures in heritage management. I interpret governance structures as the formal and informal frameworks within a community that oversee its everyday affairs, shaping the relationships between administration, businesses, and residents. Emphasizing bottom-up approaches, I seek to highlight strategies that empower communities in safeguarding their heritage, fostering a strong sense of identity, place-making, and long-term sustainability. Ultimately, I view heritage as an active process—an asset that communities can leverage, capitalize on, and take pride in.
The main methodologies I am currently applying in my research are literature review and comparative analysis, but my intention is to go beyond the books and make interviews, focus groups and participatory fieldwork. My expected outcomes from this TRT is a deeper understanding of heritage as a social asset, learning from peers about its potential and risks. I do believe it can be a very enriching experience for everybody involved as it will foster debate and find new approaches.
Carlos Burgos Tartera is a student from the 3rd cohort of the UNA EUROPA PhD. With a Masters in Cultural Tourism and a publication in the Journal of Heritage Tourism, Participatory governance of intangible heritage to develop sustainable rural tourism. My research explores heritage-based solutions for remote communities, fostering intergenerational and cross-border dialogue to promote sustainable development and rural regeneration.
We are pleased to announce our next workshop, taking place on: 14 March 2025, from 10:00–13:00 (CET).
This workshop will provide a platform for researchers to share their approaches to Social Capital, Mutuality, and Volunteering in the context of Cultural Heritage. We are aiming for an open exchange of ideas, potential collaborations, and discussions of practical considerations. For this workshop we are interested in how your work engages with the dynamic processes of heritage-making and its transformation into social capital.
Abstract submission deadline: 12:00 (CET), 20 February 2025 Notification of acceptance: 28 February 2025.
The workshop will be held in hybrid format at all universities in the Una Europa alliance. Below you will find a document with full specifics, but do not hesitate to reach out to us with further questions. Also, feel free to pass this call along to colleagues who may find interest in the event.
Introduction: Under this theme, we study Cultural Heritage not just as product but also as process. We are interested in how Cultural Heritage is produced and by whom, by co-producing heritage studies together with increasingly diverse communities. Cultural heritage, whether tangible or intangible, is also about process – that curates and creates its assets, transforms and transcends these from cultural to social capital, towards greater well-being, resilience, sustainability and social cohesion. Heritage-as-process produces tensions, too, as flows of power, contested meanings and temporalities in new and existing forms of practice intersect. We wish to harness this in-betweenness of cultural heritage, between being and doing, to work with existing heritages and their (dis-)associated communities towards creating new ones.
////////////////////////////////////
In 2011, the architect-curator Rem Koolhaas made a complaint: over three centuries, heritage has expanded its empire: from objects to buildings, buildings to settings, settings to landscapes, tangible landscapes to intangible practices. Along the way, the government of this empire has grown more and more complex, from individual antiquarians and collectors to national and international bodies such as ICOMOS and UNESCO.
And yet, at the same time, it has never actually decided what that empire is actually for. Research in this area will address this question, asking how cultural heritage is produced, and what it produces,
LauraJane Smith has written that this ‘Authorised Heritage Discourse’ (Smith 2014 p. 135) has long been imagined as somehow separate from the rest of social conduct:
as material, non-renewable and fragile. It privileges aesthetically pleasing material objects, sites, places and/or landscapes. Their fragility requires that current generations must care for, protect and venerate these things so that they may be inherited by future generations. Within this framework heritage is something that is ‘found’…
This transnational research group of Una Europa challenges this discourse to ask what we might do with heritage beyond venerating it, in order to give its empire a mission.
Starting with the Burra Charter 1999, studies aiming to develop methodologies for assessing the value of heritage (Getty Conservation Institute 2002, ICOMOS 2011, Historic England 2019), have developed, categories of heritage significance such as historical, evidential, aesthetic and communal value.
But whilst heritage disciplines have become, over time, adept at defining and assessing the first three of these categories, the last and newer category of ‘communal value’ has proved more challenging. The close association of heritage with the communal values of the nation state has been challenged by other conceptions of community: both smaller scale (local communities for instance, and differently distributed (communities of identity, mobility, or digital connection). The institutions have often found it hard to keep up with the continuously shifting shape of the communities whose heritage they were established to safeguard.
This is a process that is being recognized by JPICH, who in their 2020 Strategic Research and innovation agenda name ‘a reflective society’ and ‘Connecting people with heritage’ as priority themes. Under these headings, they seek research that will not just protect heritage, but will explore how we can use it to ‘empower’ society’, and ‘facilitate the bringing together of citizens and practitioners in co-creation processes’ contributing to the formation of sustainable identities, well-being, and social cohesion. In short, the current European research agenda concerning heritage asks how its cultural capital might be translated into social capital.
One the one hand, this agenda explores strategies for public engagement – an already well-established current of activity through which heritage stakeholders – often institutional – seek to make their heritage assets more relevant to contemporary and increasingly diverse audiences. On the other, the relations and flows of power and authority that are evoked through processes of engagement are more complex and contested than terms like ‘co-creation’ can easily account for (Morse, Macpherson and Robinson 2013, Graham 2012, Mygind, Hällman and Bentsen 2015).
Recently, international pilot programs have tested people-centred heritage approaches in diverse cultural and organisational contexts: People and Heritage run by ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property); Nature-Culture: The World Heritage Leadership partnership between IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), ICOMOS (International Council of Monuments and Sites) and ICCROM; Panorama – solutions for a Healthy Planet developed by IUCN and GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH).
In addition, digital technologies raise new possibilities for generating and supporting relevance, including the ‘distributed museum’(Proctor 2010; Rodley 2019) and collaborative digital experiences, where Perry et al (2019) note that digital experiences in heritage settings are often designed for individuals rather than groups. In the current pandemic context, there is a strong argument for developing digital visitor experiences at a distance, which also create opportunities for developing new audiences who may encounter heritage infrequently, if at all.
But research in this thematic area can go beyond the issue of public engagement to enquire how heritage assets, and the processes through which people engage with them contribute to ‘communal’ values that go beyond heritage itself. Indeed, it can explore ways in which communities go beyond working with existing heritage assets to creating new ones – or conversely, ‘declassifying’ them. In this context, heritage comes to refer to the processes of its own creation (and destruction) as much as the things which are created or destroyed.
The sort of research might build on the context of more recent writings on heritage such as critiques of the ‘Authorised Heritage Discourse’ or Otero Pailos and Arrhenius’ (2016) accounts of ‘Experimental Conservation’ to point towards alternative approaches that have not found their way into official pronouncements. This process will build on accounts of, and experiments in, participatory engagement (see, for example Markus Miessen’s Did Somebody Say Participate? (2006)). This research might inquire what would happen if the “in betweenness” of historic, objects, and practices, which are, of course, in perpetual development, was set to work? What if the processes of change that sites inevitably undergo during their lifecourse (Cairns and Jacobs 2014) – and the fascinations they can arouse – were harnessed, so that the process itself, rather than its products contributes to social formation?
This call, then, will interest heritage scholars (and activists) from across the social sciences and humanities in politics, ethics, and activism, as well as scholars with a particular commitment to generating societal impact.
