Publications

A selection of publications; books, chapters and journal articles by CHRC members. 

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Ethics (edited by Andreas Pantazatos, Tracy Ireland, John Schofield and Rouran Zhang). With its 34 original chapters, the Handbook offers a comprehensiveand rigorous analysis of the concepts, challenges and dilemmas that characterise and shape contemporary heritage ethics in theory and practice. The aim of the Handbook is to facilitate discussion and conversations about the significance of heritage ethics and the necessity for researchers and practitioners to engage and adopt an ethical approach in all that they do.

 'Border-Straddling Heritages: Containment, Contestation & Appreciation of Shared Pasts' chapter by Dr Dacia Viejo Rose and Dr Hung Kyung Le 

“This is an excellent collection of essays on the mutual constitution of heritage and bordering practices, with a wide-ranging geographical and geopolitical scope. The book manages a careful balance of theoretical richness and clear positioning in the field.”  Chris Whitehead, Newcastle University

More than two thousand people from the British Channel Islands were deported to and interned in Germany during the Second World War, making up as many as 60% of all interned British citizens in occupied territory during this period.

This book carries out an in-depth analysis of artwork, objects, oral testimonies, archives, poetry, letters, diaries and memoirs gathered from the internees and drawing from around one hundred collections. The work is based on over 15 years of research and interviews with more than 65 former internees, and explores analytical themes and narratives of placemaking, resistance, communities, food and cooking. It also proposes new concepts and categories to help us understand objects that distinguish the experience of internment.

This paper describes the work undertaken as part of the ‘Digital Documentation of Ksar Said’ Project. This project, funded by the British Council, combined education, history, and heritage for the digital preservation of tangible and intangible aspects of heritage associated with the 19th century Said Palace (Ksar Said) in Tunis. We produced an interactive 3D model of Ksar Said and developed learning resources to build Tunisian students’ critical engagement with their heritage through inquiry learning activities within the 3D model. Results demonstrate the potential of this novel approach to virtual learning and inform future co-design, evaluation and implementation choices for improving the generative power of three dimensional virtual replication of heritage sites in the cultural heritage sector.

Cultural Heritage, Ethics and Contemporary Migrations breaks new ground in our understanding of the challenges faced by heritage practitioners and researchers in the contemporary world of mass migration, where people encounter new cultural heritage and relocate their own. It focuses particularly on issues affecting archaeological heritage sites and artefacts, which help determine and maintain social identity, a role problematised when populations are in flux. This diverse and authoritative collection brings together international specialists to discuss socio-political and ethical implications for the management of archaeological heritage in global society.

Research into how and what families learn in science museums and other informal science learning settings suggests that parent-child interactions play an important role in shaping children’s learning experiences. Our exploratory case study set out to discover and analyse learning happening within family groups during a visit to a traditional museum natural history gallery. Research methods were influenced by a growing body of literature that looks for learning in family visitor talk.

This book approaches the issue of rural-urban inequality through fieldwork conducted in a specific township (Zuogang) in Qinggang County, part of Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China. Presenting painstaking fieldwork in a single location, it successfully illuminates fundamental aspects of the reality and the complexity of rural-urban inequality that cannot be found in macro-level studies, most of which are prepared by economists. The book offers a unique combination of rigorous economic analysis with insightful social and anthropological analysis, as well as revealing interviews with local government officials. This approach provides a rich tapestry of rural perceptions of rural-urban inequality.

Museum codes of ethics stress the importance of preservation, knowledge and access, but they remain silent on the justificatory framework of the duty of care museums have to the objects in their collections and on museums' obligations towards their public. In this essay I propose a triangular framework for understanding the duty of care museums have, according to which it is shaped by the need to negotiate an object's transit from past to future in such a way as to secure that object's future significance. The account provided of transit to the future is underwritten by a model of trust as entrusting. Hence, museums' duty to care for the objects in their collections is found to be grounded on the demands of the trust relationship, complemented by the respect that is necessary for effective negotiation of the transit from past to future.

This chapter takes as its point of departure the opening chapter of the work of Gabriella Elgenius (2011) and, to a lesser extent, the work of Benedict Anderson (2006) who has argued that nations are but ‘cultural artefacts’ and ‘imagined communities’. I am drawn to the idea that the nation as an entity exists first and foremost in the imagination, an artefact comprising various elements chosen to fit that imagining. For, as will be discussed in this chapter, just as nations are cultural artefacts, so too are the aspects of heritage that they choose to symbolise, imagine, define and build themselves.

This latest volume in the World Yearbook of Education series examines the global education industry both in OECD* countries as well as developing countries, and presents the works of scholars based in different parts of the word who have significantly contributed to this area of research. Focusing on the areas of cross-over in public-private partnerships in education, WYBE 2016 critically examines the actors and factors that have propelled the global rise of the education industry.

A shift in the symbolic ‘site of memory’ at Verdun substantially shaped the creation of the physical landscape of remembrance post-1916, examined in this chapter through the ‘biographies’ of the two monuments already mentioned, the Ossuary at Douaumont and the Monument to Victory. Both monuments commemorate the same event and were erected as elements of a memorial landscape uniting the city and ‘its’ battlefield through ritual and symbolism. However, this picture is complicated by the fact that monuments are physical entities located in a concrete landscape.

Ritual landscapes and borders are recurring themes running through Professor Kalle Sognnes' long research career. This anthology contains 13 articles written by colleagues from his broad network in appreciation of his many contributions to the field of rock art research. The contributions discuss many different kinds of borders: those between landscapes, cultures, traditions, settlements, power relations, symbolism, research traditions, theory and methods.

The Mediterranean has been for millennia one of the global cockpits of human endeavour. World-class interpretations exist of its Classical and subsequent history, but there has been remarkably little holistic exploration of how its societies, culture and economies first came into being, despite the fact that almost all the fundamental developments originated well before 500 bc . This book is the first full, interpretive synthesis for a generation on the rise of the Mediterranean world from its beginning, before the emergence of our own species, up to the threshold of Classical times.

It has become increasingly clear that cultural heritage is an important agent in the interfacing between culture generally and the specificities of politics. This has particular significant repercussions regarding the roles that heritage plays in armed conflict. Analyses of this intersection have therefore become an important field within heritage studies. Such studies have begun to reveal the multifaceted and profound ways that cultural heritage is affected by armed conflicts: it is looted, damaged and destroyed either as a result of deliberate targeting or as part of the general violence.

Preservation by record is a key concept in heritage management. It applies where preservation in situ (keeping a site  in an unchanged state) is impossible or impractical and involves making a  detailed and comprehensive record before the material is lost. In the case of  the White Sea rock-art, complex ‘preservation by record’ becomes essential  when rock surfaces are stripped bare of any vegetation and the area is too  big to install a protective cover.

This book explores the role of cultural heritage in post-conflict reconstruction, whether as a motor for the prolongation of violence or as a resource for building reconciliation. The research was driven by two main goals: first, to understand the post-conflict reconstruction process in terms of cultural heritage, and second, to identify how this process evolves in the medium term and the impact it has on society. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and its subsequent phases of reconstruction provides the primary material for this exploration.

This is the first volume specifically dedicated to the consolidation and clarification of Heritage Studies as a distinct field with its own means of investigation. It presents the range of methods that can be used and illustrates their application through case studies from different parts of the world, including the UK and USA. The challenge that the collection makes explicit is that Heritage Studies must develop a stronger recognition of the scope and nature of its data and a concise yet explorative understanding of its analytical methods.