What do nuclear waste disposal, built heritage conservation, endangered language preservation, museum collecting, and the curation of family heirlooms have in common?
Heritage Futures was a 4-year research programme (2015-2019) funded by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Large Grant (‘Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage,’ AH/M004376/1), and supported additionally by its host universities and partner organisations. The project carried out ambitious interdisciplinary research to explore the potential for innovation and creative exchange across a broad range of heritage and related fields, in partnership with a number of academic and non-academic institutions and interest groups.
It was succeeded by the follow-on project Landscape Futures and the Challenge of Change: Towards Integrated Cultural/Natural Heritage Decision Making, funded under the AHRC Landscape Decisions/Changing Landscapes Follow-on Fund for Impact and Engagement Call.
The project worked across four themes:
Uncertainty – How is the uncertainty of the deep future conceived of and managed in different fields of conservation practice?
Transformation – What values are associated with heritage structures and landscapes that are allowed to undergo transformation and change?
Profusion – How do museums and people in their homes decide what to keep in the face of mass production and consumption?
Diversity – How are biological, cultural, genetic, and linguistic diversity categorised and conserved, and what can one field learn from another?
Read more about the project in our Open Access book, available to download from the UCL Press website and see our Vimeo site to view some of the project's film outputs.
