Dr Andreas Pantazatos

Heritage is never politically neutral. My research examines the epistemic and ethical questions that emerge from this recognition, focusing on how relations of power shape the capacity of communities to know, value and make decisions about their heritage, and how heritage in turn shapes communities’ ability to imagine and build their futures. This work is grounded in the belief that ethical thinking about heritage must respond to the lived realities of the communities it concerns, and that sustained dialogue across different disciplines is essential to achieving this.

In 2026 I published The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Ethics (co-edited with Tracy Ireland, John Schofield and Rouran Zhang), the first comprehensive reference work to map the conceptual foundations, challenges and applied dilemmas of heritage ethics across its full disciplinary range. The Handbook brings together 34 contributors from archaeology, architecture, art history, conservation, digital humanities, heritage management, museology, philosophy, political science, and urban planning. In our co-authored Introduction, we argue for the significance of interdisciplinary dialogue for heritage theory and practice, and set out a framework for understanding how ethical questions arise from and are transformed by specific heritage contexts.

At the centre of this agenda lies the question: whose knowledge counts in heritage processes? Drawing on the concept of participant perspective epistemic injustice, I have examined how communities are excluded from the interpretation and curation of their own heritage. In my contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (ed. Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus, 2017) I applied this framework to cultural heritage sites, arguing that heritage institutions can perpetuate forms of epistemic marginalisation when they fail to recognise the knowledge and testimonies of the communities they serve. I extended this work to the experience of displaced communities in Cultural Heritage, Ethics and Contemporary Migrations (co-edited with Cornelius Holtorf and Geoffrey Scarre, 2019), where I argued that war refugees and migrants suffer epistemic injustice when they are not provided with the space to contribute their knowledge about their own heritage and its connections to the heritage of their host country.

My ongoing project ‘Living with Difficult Past in the South Mediterranean Sea’ applies this approach on the island of Leros, Greece, investigating the heritage of the former Leros Psychiatric Hospital. The hospital’s conditions provoked an international scandal in the late 1980s and triggered Greece’s psychiatric deinstitutionalisation reforms; its buildings, institutional memory and social afterlife remain deeply present in the lives of islanders. Developed in collaboration with KOISPE,at Leros, the Social Cooperative of the Dodecanese Mental Health Sector, the project draws on oral histories and community testimonies to explore what it means to live alongside a difficult institutional past. This research has produced the chapter ‘Caring Encounters' in the Handbook, an invited research talk at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens in November 2023 and a keynote presentation at the European Association of Archaeologists Annual Conference in Athens in August 2026. My work at Leros was also featured in the film documentary Breaking Ground — Reinventing an Island, directed by Ioanna Asmeniadou-Fokas.

The Leros project contributes to what I describe as the heritage of mental health. I am currently pursuing this line of inquiry through my advisory role on the AHRC-funded Research Network ‘The Ethics of Medical Photography: Past, Present and Future’ (2024–2026), where I contribute to the development of a toolkit for the engagement of medical photographs in archives and museums. Looking ahead, I am developing a monograph on how the ethics of care can help us respond to the challenges of the heritage of mental health, and an AHRC Impact Accelerator Award is enabling me to build a new framework for engaging communities living alongside mental health heritage sites and for the ethical use of photographic material relating to psychiatric hospitals.