Research themes in the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies
Cultural Politics and Policy
What are the factors (e.g. instrumentalisation, legislation, cultural diversely, politics and sustainability) that determine how cultural policy is constructed, institutionally, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally?
How do management strategies affect heritage resources?
What is the impact upon cultural policy of large-scale constitutional changes?
What are the intended and unintended consequences of implementing international (e.g. UNESCO, ICOMOS) conventions, charters and instruments?
How can research contribute to cultural policy construction rather than its implementation?
How do political movements/agendas (both historic and contemporary) intersect with heritage? For example, devolution in Wales or apartheid in South Africa, or theories of governmentality and its relationship to heritage.
How is heritage defined and attributed values? How are these various understandings of heritage produced, mobilised, and regulated, and for what purposes and with what effects?
Identity, Community and Place
How are identities, places and communities constructed and represented through heritage? How do we understand consumption of heritage?
How is heritage used by, and for, communities? How does co-production work in a heritage context and what is at stake?
What are the relationships between notions of place and identities, communities, and heritages locally regionally, nationally and internationally?
How are the principles of community museology and ecomuseology practised in different contexts?
What are the relationships between heritage tourism and identities, communities and places? What is the relationship between heritage and sustainable development?
How are identities produced through the consumption of heritage?
What is the nature of the relationship between identity construction and wellbeing?
Media and Representation
How do media work in heritage organisations (including historic sites, museums, and galleries of historical and contemporary art) and how do organisations work as media (e.g. through exhibitions, collecting, interpreting etc.)?
What factors (technological, institutional, economic, political etc.) shape the production, morphology and consumption of media and media representations in heritage organisations?
What representations (of the past, of other cultures, of the world etc.) are made possible through institutional technologies specific to heritage organisations and how can they be analysed to understand culture, society and knowledge?
How can digital heritage technologies (in-gallery and online) be designed and studied? What is the role and impact of user participation in these processes?