Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage Seminar

Abstract

How does heritage make the future? From nuclear waste in Sweden to global endangered languages, from a frozen genetic 'Ark' in Nottingham to the global seed vault in Arctic Norway, and from 'rewilded' landscapes in Portugal to paper-based archives in Paris, Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage (AAFH) aims to develop a broad, international and cross-sectoral comparative framework for understanding 'heritage' not as a domain which is concerned with the past, but rather as a series of heterogeneous yet distinctive practices oriented towards assembling (alternative) futures.  This paper introduces this collaborative research project, which involves a team of 10 researchers, 3 PhD students and 21 international partner organisations, and aims to show how its broad themes relate to some of the most pressing ecological, social and political issues of our time.