Archaeological collections held by universities represent a persistent challenge in decolonising and re-imagining collections within academic contexts. Situated between research and education, these collections often develop over many decades of field-based research carried out by staff with varied interests. Within neo-liberalising university contexts and increasingly challenging funding environments, collections often find themselves placed in the 'too hard box'. In this paper, we utilise the case study of our own institution, Waipapa Taumata Rau (the University of Auckland), to historicise this significant archaeological collection and expand our understanding of stewardship, decolonisation and heritage. Through the process of theorising and understanding this collection's history and meaning we are learning how to overcome institutional inertia to deconstruct the 'too hard box'.
Drawing on nearly 2 years of qualitative fieldwork involving interviews, informal conversations, and spatial observations, this article explores the striking absence of public discomfort towards imperial monuments in postcolonial states. Taking Lutyens' Delhi as its empirical focus, it demonstrates how material remnants of imperialism have been normalised and embraced as national heritage in postcolonial India. What began as an inquiry into public responses to the 2019 Central Vista redevelopment evolved into a broader examination of Lutyens' Delhi as a celebrated symbol of nationhood despite its origins in domination and exclusivity. The concept of uncomfortable heritage helps frame this paradox, which is further developed by conceptualising the area as a contested field of memory. The analysis identifies three forms of memory works - appeals to institutional authority, aesthetic valuation, and affective detachment - that mediate public engagement with imperial space and facilitate the selective absorption of colonial histories. To unsettle the apparent naturalisation of these processes, the paper finally introduces Dhar & omacr;hara as an indigenous conceptual counterpoint to Eurocentric heritage discourse, foregrounding alternative ethical relationships to the past that exceed preservationist and aesthetic logics.
This paper examines how the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, D.C. and the Palestine Museum US in Woodbridge, Connecticut, use digital self-representation to make Palestinian history and presence publicly credible and legible in a U.S. context where Palestinian narratives are contested. Through digital methods and textual analysis of their websites, this paper argues that both museums engage in legitimacy work through three mechanisms: (1) complicating dominant historical narratives through documentation and historical records, (2) seeking to foster a sense of collective identity across the diaspora through shared symbols and institutional practices, and (3) creating space for Palestinian voices across past and present through storytelling and participatory framing of a collective narrative. Situated within scholarship on settler colonialism, spatial production, and memory, the analysis shows how these museums function as sites of narrative intervention and collective memory, while also highlighting the practical and political constraints that shape what can be made public. It underscores how community museums can contribute to decolonising space, resisting dispossession, and enabling self-representation for marginalised groups.
This article examines the relationship between cosmopolitanism, heritage, and authenticity in Oman, focusing on Afro-Omani musical and ritual traditions and in particular on the genre of l & emacr;wa. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with musicians, heritage officials, archivists, and community elders, alongside participant observation and archival analysis, it argues that cosmopolitanism has not corroded tradition in Oman. Rather, long histories of Indian Ocean mobility and cultural exchange were among the conditions through which Omani tradition took shape. The article introduces the concept of cosmopolitan authenticity to describe traditions whose legitimacy emerges through historically normalised exchange rather than through cultural purity. By tracing the origins, performance contexts, and current heritage status of l & emacr;wa, it shows how a genre shaped by East African and Baloch connections has been absorbed into Omani social life and national heritage discourse as an authoritative expression of local tradition. A further strand of the argument concerns the interaction between community practice and official heritage institutions: tradition is made neither by communities alone nor by state frameworks alone, but in the negotiated space between them. The findings bear on cosmopolitanism studies, critical heritage studies, and scholarship on the western Indian Ocean world.
This article examines how the climate emergency makes histories of pollution central to the heritage management of the Geul valley in the Netherlands. Our investigation combined forms of walking research through the valley, historical and policy research, design workshops (river ateliers) in 2024 and 2025. At the core of this article lies a methodological interest in doing heritage research differently in the context of the climate crisis. Our examination of heritage practices took place through creative intervention and experimentation. While our approach follows from observing the caring relations underpinning the heritage management of the Geul valley in the Netherlands, the methodological implications can be extended to other landscapes and forms of landscape management affected by pollution. In this article we argue that nature conservation is a highly curatorial practice that entails forms of toxic love. Acknowledging this curatorial character, in turn, invites interventions that serve as a form of research, while also allowing for new ideas for conservation strategies for stakeholders that aim at activating creativity in the landscape.
This study investigates how residents of & Idot;znik and Trabzon engage with and perceive Byzantine heritage within the context of shifting national and ideological narratives in T & uuml;rkiye. While official state discourse has increasingly adopted neo-Ottomanist 're-conquest' frameworks that portray Byzantine sites as ideological symbols or cultural 'others', little is known about how this heritage is understood at the local level. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines public opinion surveys and field observations, the research explores how local communities interact with Byzantine monuments that occupy different positions within the urban landscape, from prominent and actively used sites to marginal or inaccessible remains. The findings reveal a notable 'dissonance': while residents acknowledge the historical and economic importance of these sites, personal connections remain weak, marked by limited knowledge and emotional detachment. This disconnection is reinforced by a knowledge ecosystem that includes national education and popular media, which perpetuate conflict-centred narratives. By situating these perceptions within the broader context of heritage policies, the paper argues that adopting more inclusive and participatory approaches - recognising the multiple meanings attributed to Byzantine sites - is essential for fostering local ownership and ensuring their sustainable conservation in T & uuml;rkiye.
This study adopts an interdisciplinary approach to interrogate a creative public history project commemorating Horton Cemetery in Epsom, Surrey - Europe's largest asylum burial ground containing around 9,000 unmarked graves. The 'Out of Sight, Out of Mind' project, supported by a Historic England 'Everyday Heritage' grant, facilitated numerous arts-based, historical workshops and a large scale, crowd-sourced memorial installation. Written qualitative feedback from nearly 300 participants is analysed through the imbricated and iterative theoretical frameworks of heterotopia (spatial othering), rhetorical space (discursive construction), place identity (affective attachment), and everyday heritage praxis (lived, community-based enactment). This case study demonstrates how creative and co-productive local heritage activities can surface marginalised histories, (re)animate rhetorical spaces, and contribute to place identity formation and future-oriented heritage imaginaries.
This paper investigates the public biography of the statue of Carlo Felice in Cagliari to explore, through a specific case study, the historical intertwining of public and contested memory, asymmetrical power relations and later decolonial reinterpretations in Sardinia. Rather than assuming internal colonialism as a settled category for the Savoy period, this article tests its analytical usefulness against the documented biography of a single monument and its successive resemanticisations in public space. Drawing on archival, iconographic, photographic, material, and digital sources, this article reconstructs the process through which the statue was designed, produced, and installed, along with the networks of relationships that have characterised the social life of this artefact over time. This study shows how the monument's uses and meanings have been continually produced and renegotiated by different actors, and how careful analysis of sources and attention to object history can better inform public debate. The article also shows that the Sardinian debate over the monument, including early demands for its reinterpretation or removal, predated both the wider circulation of Black Lives Matter and the 2020 European wave of protest against problematic monuments. The case highlights both the risk and potential of engaging with difficult and dissonant heritage.
Using collections of Ancient Egyptian human remains in Dutch museums as a case study in meaning-making, this article asks how kinship and agency are delineated at the edge cases of the 'human'. By examining Ancient Egyptian remains through a more-than-human lens, webs of affect, embodiment, care and identification are drawn across the boundaries between life and death. Beginning with reconceptualisations of the Ancient Egyptian mummified body in Leiden's seventeenth-century Theatrum Anatomicum, this article follows the dispersals of Ancient Egyptian human remains between institutions. These racialised remains become a means of circumscribing or redefining normative ontological categories such as those between the living and dead, ancient and modern, Self and Other, human and non-human. 'Object' agencies emerge against popular appraisals of these hyper-visible, broadly exhibited bodies, which have come to be subsumed within heritage frameworks. Accordingly, these collections gain emergent properties as they traverse networks of meaning-making and belonging across geographic and taxonomic categories, within and beyond the Netherlands.
This article examines how vernacular religious spaces can function as sites of heritage governance and institutional mediation within heritage education for upper secondary students in contemporary Hanoi, through two comparative case studies: the Ph & ugrave; & Dstrok;ong historical complex associated with the legend of Saint Gi & oacute;ng and the West Lake Palace (Phu T & acirc;y Ho Shrine), a major centre of Mother Goddess worship in urban Vietnam. Drawing on theories of social and cultural capital and conceptualisations of heritage as a social process, the study adopts a qualitative, comparative design integrating survey data, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. The findings show that positioning students as active participants within sacred and semi-regulated heritage spaces not only enhances heritage awareness but also reconfigures social capital as a governance resource, mediating relationships between educational institutions, heritage communities, local custodians, and heritage authorities. These sites emerge as arenas of negotiated authority where policy frameworks, moral legitimacy, and community participation intersect in everyday heritage management. The article contributes to heritage studies by framing heritage education as a form of applied heritage governance and outlining implications for participatory heritage management in rapidly changing Southeast Asian urban contexts.
