The Emotional Politics of Heritage

4th Annual Heritage Lecture 

Professor Laura Jane Smith

Australian National University

This lecture was given on Thursday 25th February 2021 online

A recording of the lecture can be found on our Resources Page

About the lecture

This talk, drawing Professor Smith’s new book 'Emotional Heritage', will theorise both the affective qualities of heritage and the processes through which heritage becomes a resource of political power. Heritage is both an emotional and political resource that is readily and visibly mobilised in right-wing populist movements. However, the lecture will also identify the less obvious and quieter ways heritage works to emotionally legitimise and maintain the status quo while also identifying the emotional registers that underline how heritage is used to affirm progressive social and political aspirations. The talk will be illustrated with cases from the USA and Australia. 

About our speaker

Laura Jane Smith is the Head of the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University and the editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies. In a distinguished career Laura Jane Smith has produced some of the defining research and publications in the field of Heritage Studies, including Uses of Heritage (2006), Heritage, Communities and Archaeology (2009 with Emma Waterton), and Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites (2020). Her work challenges the idea of heritage as primarily or simply an ‘object’ or ‘site’, and retheorises heritage as a cultural process of meaning and memory making.