Coordinators: Dacia Viejo-Rose (University of Cambridge) and Alicia Stevens (University of Cambridge)
Overview
The legacies of the past are all around us, inseparable from our contemporary society. Our world is currently grappling with the legacies of how humanity has for generations (mis)treated the planet, even as we enter a realm where AI is shaping the future at an unprecedented scale. The recent boom in Heritage Studies, Memory Studies, and the current interest in the legacies of past violence, indicate how far we are from severing our ties with the deep past despite globalization and the apparent forward momentum of accelerating change. On the contrary, current circumstances have stimulated a sense of urgency for understanding how we have gotten to where we are now and how we might harness that knowledge to forge a more equitable future.
Inhabiting a space of mediation between past, present, and future, critical heritage studies offers resources for creative solutions to these challenges. Surpassing the idea of cultural heritage as a series of monuments or objects of purely historical or aesthetic value, it is understood today as a highly political and constantly evolving process of meaning making and key component of identity politics. Heritage facilitates the stories that society tells itself about itself, delineating boundaries of belonging and defining who lies outside them. By focusing specifically on how legacies are forged, their potential for social exclusion or cohesion, and the role they play in knowledge creation, we aim to foster years of cross-disciplinary scholarly innovation that will achieve critical impact across international policymaking, institutional governance, and global society.
Current Scope
We aim to bring together researchers, practitioners, and public audiences to discuss these important themes. Selected cases will range from legacies of cultural displacement, dislocation, and exile through the lens of visual artists and art-making; to the introduction of public-facing ‘Difficult Cambridge’ walking tours designed to engage everday visitors to MIT in firsthand memory acts; to Writing Away Days and Lunchtime Seminars geared towards Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and the public.
Guiding Questions
- By examining the historical origins of the epistemologies that we work with today, how can we identify ways to break with them when they perpetuate epistemic exclusion?
- How can we link memory work across the sciences and humanities?
- How might this linkage inform debates about social justice in terms of how we collectively remember and forget, and how memories of past harm resurge during periods of crisis?
- What are the dynamics of continuity and rupture in narratives of loss and resilience?
Goals
Our primary goals are to gain
- Broader epistemic understandings as well as specific concrete material evidence related to how governments or activist groups use the wide-ranging idea of “legacies” to shape society in different ways to suit varying socio-political agendas as well as data-driven research into how cultural traditions travel.
- Informed and deep analysis across history, historiography, geography, socio-politics, culture, and more, to begin to unpack the problematic legacies we inherited from the past and employ this knowledge in the present by asking precisely what legacies we wish to leave to the future.
- Increased incorporation of STEM methodologies, from carbon dating to ground-based sonar to digital simulations of heritage sites and museum collections for teaching and learning. Tracing such material evidence reveals different iterations and understandings of heritage, bridging the philological to the empirical to the social scientific.