Critical Heritage Studies: Current Discourses and Global Challenges

The symposium Critical Heritage Studies: Current Discourses and Global Challenges was held on 7-8 November at the World Culture Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden. An exhibition showcased humanistic fabrications and simulations and the symposium also included presentations and panel discussions with scholars from Sweden, Germany, and England.

Astrid von Rosen, Archives cluster CCHS UGOT, and Johan Åhlfeldt, CDH UGOT, demonstrated a database for the research project Expansion and Diversity, which is mapping diversity in performance history, between the years 1965 and 2000.

Jonathan Westin, Research Coordinator and Associate Professor in Heritage Conservation, CDH, and Archive Cluster CHS UGOT, showed a piece of rock art as well as an app which provides information about the stone and its surroundings.

Gunnar Almevik, UGOT, has reconstructed a stave church together with Jonathan Westin, which can be experienced through VR glasses.

Alda Terracciano, UCL, with her multisensory exhibition of Zelige Door on Golborne Road. The user may feel, smell, and taste the morroccan market at Golborne Road in London.

The second session was named Criticial Heritage in more than human worlds, followed by a mingle with refreshments in the late afternoon. The second day of the symposium was dedicated to writings about mental health and psychiatry, and the heritage of mental health, madness, and psychiatry. Patients of psychiatrics institutions are often absent, but scholars from the University of Gothenburg, Potsdam and Humboldt University in Berlin gave the listeners examples of writers who have written down their stories. The theme of the final session was Co-curating the city: universities and urban heritage past and future.