The
Heritage Theory and Practice Conference was a one day event at Leeds
City Hall, hosted by Leeds Beckett and Northumbria Universities. It focused on the practical applications of heritage theory (as the name suggests). I
attended in my professional capacity; as a largely academic
conference I hoped that there would be some commercial input, and
that the practice element would contain elements that archaeologists
and heritage practitioners at large could take away from the
conference. As it was the first time this conference had been run,
there was a wide variety of papers, focusing on a number of areas of
theory and practices within the heritage sector.
Dr
Bernadette Lynch provided the excellent keynote speech, reflecting on
her time in Canadian institutions, opening her eyes to how different
cultures perceive museum practices in positive and negative ways, but
also how museums can be proactive in understanding different
cultures. Sounds easy, but the reality of some of the issues museums
face was demonstrated by her work as director of the Manchester
Museum, where minority ethnic groups were openly invited to have
their say on how museums work for them, which had some surprising
results, particularly if you see museums as part of a "power-charged
set of exchanges", which often manifest as political and social
exchanges. She concluded that museums should be used as spaces for
"friendly enemies", where you can have conflicting opinions
and debate in a safe space, and criticising Scottish museums for not
exploring Scottish-ness during the 2014 referendum.
The
first session was titled Establishing Heritage, which had papers on
the intangible heritage of women during the Upper Clyde Shipyards
strikes in Glasgow (by Tara Beale), the Church Heritage Record (CHR)
(by Rob Piggott), and the influence of heritage studies on
designation practice for listed buildings and scheduled monuments (by
Claire Price). This session was the one I was professionally most
interested in as understanding the forces at work in defining our
HERs allows you to think about what could be missed out- what about
feminist heritage, for example? Often the HERs and the CHR (which
both feeds into and uses the HERs but is used by the Church of
England and the Church of Wales, some 16,000 entries to date) is
biased towards the architectural records, rather the social
significance of the entry; a hangover from when the first legislation
for scheduled monuments was made in 1882 (The Ancient Monuments Act).
There was also some discussion on to what extent the bureaucracy
involved in church heritage records are dictated by the legality
given to it by being a "servant of the state" (i.e.
Historic England's position as a part of government).
The
second session Participatory Approaches in Heritage Practice, with a
presentation by the Bam! Sistahood project (by Rosie Lewis and
project volunteers, The Angelou Centre), which looked at how a
successful project focusing on ethnic minorities can be easily
mishandled if it's done from a top-down approach. While museums can
help with these projects, empowering minority communities by
discovering their own heritage and presenting it in a unique manner
that doesn't necessarily have to be recorded. The focus on training,
sharing information and creating safe spaces for women have proved to
be good ways of getting women from minority groups to come together
and explore their own heritage in North East England. The other paper
in this session was by Tara Beale on travelling show-people in
Glasgow, and how their heritage has been preserved in a collaborative
project with Glasgow museums, which also led to reinterpretation of a
small number of the museums collections!
The
third session, Rethinking Heritage, had a theory-heavy paper on the
Museum as a deep map (by Adrian Evans). This explored architecture's
relationship with landscape in the modern world (as a detached
entity), and used this as an analogy with museum collections, with an
implicit objectivity and variety of presentation and preservation
techniques, including narrative. The most important aspect was how
much you interpret an artefact- too much and you lose the mystery of
the object. Too little and you risk going into pataphysics and
escapism (the science of imaginary solutions). The deep map allows a
narrative to be built up as layers, thus you regain the identity of
the object within it's locality. The other paper by Taras
Nakonecznyj, focusing on his work with the Cockburn Association,
Edinburgh's Civic Trust, and their attempts at promoting Edinburgh's
architectural heritage to a wider audience using social media. With
Edinburgh's cultural heritage being prioritised by the council,
potentially threatening the historic aspect of Edinburgh and
endangering it's World Heritage status, this could be an interesting
case study for the rest of the UK.
The
final session was Immersive heritage, which felt more like an outlet
from the Annual Student Archaeology conference, with a mixed bag of
quite fun and interesting papers, but with less of a critiquing
theoretical focus. However, these works should be commended as they
had no research frameworks to fall back on. There was a paper on
ghosts by Alison Edwards, who argues that as a phenomena has been
criticised too much for being a pseudo-science (with a top-down
approach) and a number of valuable points can be taken away from her
exercise (people who actively hunt ghosts themselves often do so as a
reaction to feeling left out of mainstream heritage interpretations,
much like minority ethnic groups) and the way ghost tours are
marketed and organised could be used as a model for archaeology and
heritage. However the statistical analysis of the tour was a little
thin on the ground. Rhiannon Pickett presented her work in
collaboration with the Nottingham County Gaol, where new research
into the lives of the inmates and workers there allowed for an
impressive overhaul of the interpretation of the museum, although
there was conflict in what information should be on display to the
public. The final talk of the day was given by Lisa Traynor, who
looked at reconstructing the events of 28th June, 1914, when Archduke
Franz Ferdinand was killed by a bullet. The question she sets out to
answer is "Could the archduke have survived?" (with body
armour available at the time). She isn't trying to re-imagine the
historical events but to see if the silk body armour at the time
could have stopped a bullet from the weapon it was fired from (at 2
metres). The results will be released on BBC 4 in January 2017.
Overall
this conference (which was free to attend) provided a good platform
for debating current heritage issues in the UK. It touched on a
number of pressing concerns and I feel I can take away points that
will feed into my own commercial projects. While it was
overwhelmingly academic in outlook, there were commercial
archaeologists who made the effort to go and make sure that our
voices were heard, and that relations between University researchers and
professionals are healthy.
