Award for Best Student Essays in Critical Heritage Studies 2026

For the first time, the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS) at the University of Gothenburg is presenting awards for the best bachelor's and master's essays in Critical Heritage Studies. The awards recognise student work that contributes to the development of the field of heritage studies through high academic quality, originality and innovative critical thinking.

This year's award for the best bachelor's essay goes to Marie-Louise Bahati for her essay (In)visible Studs and Imagined Archives: Finding and Exploring Black Masculine Lesbian Perceptions and Search for Heritage and Identity.

The award for the best master's essay goes to Daniela Toledo Escárate and Matteo Guzzo for their essay Living Archive: Designing Less – Embeddedness as Restraint in Cultural Mediation.

We are very honoured by this recognition and hope to keep exploring with other institutions that might benefit from a more inclusive approach to accessing art and archival material, says Daniela Toledo Escárate and Matteo Guzzo

“The Centre for Critical Heritage Studies aims to both broaden and deepen our understanding of what critical heritage studies can be. Taking a critical approach to cultural heritage means being curious and daring to ask questions such as: What can be considered cultural heritage? Who gets to decide? Whose stories are made visible, and whose are missing? Through these awards, we also want to encourage students to explore such questions and demonstrate how their work can bring new perspectives and knowledge to the field of heritage studies,” says Annelie Sjölander-Lindqvist, Director of CCHS.

The Body as an Archive

In her bachelor's essay, Marie-Louise Bahati explores how Black masculine lesbians seek out and relate to history, identity and cultural heritage – experiences that are often difficult to find in traditional archives.

The study offers new and thought-provoking perspectives on the field of heritage studies by combining critical approaches to archives, history and belonging with rich empirical material.

The jury particularly highlights the development of the idea of  "The body as an archive". This concept opens up ways of understanding archives and cultural heritage beyond documents and institutional collections: history can also be embodied, carried and brought to life through people's lived experiences, memories and communities.

The essay thus raises central questions within critical heritage studies: Whose experiences are preserved in archives? What happens to histories that have never been documented? And what other ways are there to seek out and understand cultural heritage?

“I think there is all too often a fear within academia of starting from where we stand – of exploring the experiences and ideas we encounter in our surroundings or carry within ourselves,” says Marie-Louise Bahati.

“History has always been close to my heart, but I have also always wanted to look beyond traditional history books, so it felt natural to begin there. My essay does what its title suggests: it seeks out and explores Black masculine lesbian identity and heritage, challenging what it means to be absent from the history books.

This will always be important, but today, when my participants are not afforded the same right to exist on equal terms, I believe it is especially important to examine the conditions that shape their existence and, in turn, their access to history. I will always write with and for them, and I hope this award will help more Black lesbians discover this important research.”

A Living Archive

In their master's essay, Living Archive: Designing Less – Embeddedness as Restraint in Cultural Mediation, Daniela Toledo Escárate and Matteo Guzzo explore the relationships between cultural heritage, design and participatory practices.

The jury highlights the essay's originality, intellectual ambition and consistently high quality. By combining critical heritage studies with design research and participatory methods, the authors have produced a theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded study.

The concept of Living Archive raises questions about how cultural heritage is created and communicated, and what role designers and heritage professionals should play in these processes.

The essay challenges the assumption that cultural mediation necessarily requires professionals to add, shape or direct more. Instead, it explores the potential of restraint, listening and being grounded in the contexts where cultural heritage is already being created and practised.

"Living things are imperfect, and we take that into account. What if the mistake is the method? That question became central to Living Archive", says Daniela Toledo Escárate och Matteo Guzzo.

"We began with the premise that the home is the true living archive: fluid, situated, and continually renegotiated. As design is tied to taste, and taste is a class marker, we chose a method that deliberately sets taste aside: we ask only about objects, never about design."

The project sits at the centre of four modes of access, physical, facilitated, experiential and digital, so a story can move between them without losing the conditions under which it was first told.

"Ultimately, Living Archive is a project about stories, and how to tell and retell them, ", says Daniela Toledo Escárate och Matteo Guzzo. 

"If it does no more than make a museum start asking how to make space for material like what we gathered, we believe that is already where bigger change begins."

New perspectives on heritage

This year's award recipients demonstrate how student research can bring new perspectives to ongoing discussions in critical heritage studies – about archives and representation, participation and power, and whose stories and experiences are recognised as cultural heritage.

“As the director of a city museum, reading all these fantastic essays filled me with joy, hope and renewed energy,” says Hela Joelsson Ekström, Director of Mölndal City Museum and a member of the jury.

“By raising new questions about whose stories are collected, preserved and communicated, I believe these students truly challenge established practices within the museum sector. Their research offers concrete ideas for how museums can, among other things, work more collaboratively with local communities and develop more inclusive approaches to collecting.

In this way, their work becomes a valuable resource for developing museum practice. Quite simply, they inspire those of us working in museums to be bolder in both our thinking and our actions: to dare to reconsider our familiar perspectives, ask new questions and develop our work in dialogue with the people whose histories we are entrusted with preserving.”