Welcome to the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre
About Cambridge Heritage Research Centre
The CHRC brings together academics conducting heritage research across a wide range of disciplines. In doing so, it provides a platform to critically analyse the dynamics of heritage and develop new methodological approaches that can expand our understanding of how heritage is mobilised for diverse social and political ends.
Through our research we seek to address the centrality of heritage to many of the issues facing contemporary society, advance a critical understanding of heritage. Our research, while grounded in theory, is nonetheless applied research aiming to shape practice and policy through engagement with collections, professional bodies, international organisations as well as various levels of governance and government.
What is Heritage?
Where history is the study of the past, heritage is the many ways the past is used to give meaning to the present and to shape the future. We take heritage to be an evolving social and collective phenomenon that can be understood as an active, dynamic relationship between time and space, formed through a continuous process of (re)negotiation, (re)formulation, and (re)valuation of who we are, where we come from and where we are headed.
Heritage is a rapidly growing field of fundamental contemporary significance. It is a key element in the way diverse institutions, political movements, and communities recognise their identities, attribute value, contest rights claims, and realise their political and economic strategies.
