Past Projects
Recording Decisions and Actions connected with Claims for the Removal/Protection of Statues in UK Civic Spaces during the Summer of 2020
Demands to remove or amend monuments are nothing new. However, the current movement is unprecedented in its scale and level of public involvement. Previous discussions over the fate of statues in civic spaces tended to be localised, often confined to specialist committee meetings. The events of recent weeks, however, have seen the debate galvanise the nation as a whole, dominating newsfeeds and trending on social media platforms. In this process, a historicist urban topography is being rejected, and in its place bottom-up grassroots views on the usage and meanings of heritage are being formulated. Capturing this process will provide an invaluable archive through which we can better understand the role which heritage plays in social movements. Ultimately this understanding will offer us the potential to develop policies which align heritage more closely with our collective well-being.
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Places of Joy: The Role of Heritage After Lockdown
As lockdown is gradually released, people are using heritage locations as places of reunion, sociality and escape, but also potentially to satisfy deeper psychological and socio-cultural needs. A collaboration between researchers at University of Southampton, University of Cambridge and University of Surrey, and supported by Historic England and The Heritage Alliance, Places of Joy: The Role of Heritage After Lockdown investigates whether and why heritage appears as a joyful space at a time of national crisis, and thus to understand the specific characteristics of heritage sites that contribute to wellbeing and resilience.
CRIC (Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict)
CRIC stands for Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict and is a multi-disciplinary project which investigates the relationship between cultural heritage, conflict and identity.
The project involves collaboration between nine European universities and NGOs researching case studies in Spain, France, Cyprus, Bosnia and Germany, which represent different types of conflict dating from World War I to the present day.
The re-built Mostar Bridge
The Barrow Revival Project
The Barrow Revival Project looked at public attitudes and engagements with newly built chambered tombs which seek to replicate a prehistoric form for the internment of modern cremations.
As an ‘embedded researcher’, Prof Marie Louise Stig Sørensen is following the construction of the Soulton Longbarrow by Sacred Stones Ltd and the involvement of the local landowner, Tim Ashton.
The company, formed in 2014, is dedicated to "creating meaningful final resting places for cremation ashes, inspired by the ancient burial mounds of our prehistoric ancestors."
Community museums of Western Sudan: Omdurman, El Obeid, Nyala
The Cambridge Heritage Research Centre was delighted to partner with Mallinson Architects and Engineers, the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), and project leaders ICCROM-ATHAR (Architectural and Archaeological Tangible Heritage in the Arab Region), in a £997,000 project to restore three museums in Western Sudan and provide for the educational and cultural needs of their communities, visitors and tourists.
Click here to find out more about the Community Museums of Sudan Project
Re-Opening of Darfur Museum in 2018 after 10 years closure
Restoring Cultural Property and Communities after Conflict
This AHRC funded project based at Queens University, Belfast, seeks to develop a theoretical and practical understanding of the relationship between reparations, responsibility and victimhood in transitional societies. CHRC Deputy Director, Dr Dacia Viejo Rose is a co-investigator on the project, her work aims better understand the impact of the destruction of cultural property on the affected communities and explores the practical challenges associated designing meaningful reparations.
This research was conducted in partnership with the Documentation Centre in Cambodia (DC-Cam) to explore this question.
Safeguarding Sites: The IHRA Charter for Good Practice
The project was funded by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The project identifies sites facing challenges and threats – such as through demolition, inappropriate reuse, climate change, decay or threats to site integrity - and develop a charter of good practice to safeguard the record for the future. It brought the IHRA's experts together with international conservation NGOs to develop good practice approaches to the safeguarding of physical, historical sites such as camps, execution sites, mass graves and ghettos. Members of the project core team are: Dr Gilly Carr (UK), Bruno Boyer (France), Ilya Lensky (Latvia), Dr Heidemarie Uhl (Austria), Dr Steven Cooke (Australia), and Zoltan Toth-Heinemann (Hungary). Dr Margaret Comer, Tallinn University, was the project's research assistant.
The Rock Art of the White Sea
The Rock Art of the White Sea was an international collaborative project initiated in 2008, led and directed by Dr Liliana Janik (University of Cambridge) and Dr Nadezhda Lubanova (Karelian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences) has been working on 3D recording, analysing and interpreting of the carvings and their locations since early 2000’s. The project has led to the creation of preservation by record archives of 14 sites of White Sea rock art, and has also investigated heritage aspects of rock art preservation in post-Soviet Russia.
Cabo Verde
At the invitation of a local university and the island's Ministry of Culture's IPC, the CHRC - Chris Evans & Prof Marie Louise Stig Sørensen - have been investigating its early Portuguese town of Cidade Velha since 2006. Founded in the middle decades of the 15th century, and then for some three centuries the Islands' capital, it became a major hub of the Atlantic Slave Trade, with thousands of Africans transhipped each year to the Americas.