Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

P206


(Mis)using the past for the political present: an anthropology of populist heritage-making 
Convenors:
Julia Leser (Humboldt University Berlin)
Marlena Nikody (Jagiellonian University)
Send message to Convenors
Chair:
Alice Millar (UCL)
Formats:
Panel
Mode:
Face-to-face
:
Facultat de Geografia i Història 207
Sessions:
Friday 26 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid

Short Abstract:

This panel engages with the effects that contemporary populist politics across Europe have on museums and heritage sites. It welcomes papers that deal with practices of populist heritage-making in Europe, and that consider counter-strategies of challenging and undoing populist heritage-making.

Long Abstract:

This panel engages with the effects that contemporary populist politics have on museums and heritage sites. Across Europe, heritage sites and museums are increasingly confronted with Islamophobic, anti-Semitic or anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiments, with conflicts over questions of (national) belonging and histories, or with forms of denial or misuse of scientific knowledge, regarding, for example, climate change. In particular, the uses of the past become a resource in populist politics of making political identities and ordering “grammars of belonging” (Niklasson 2023). Populist heritage-making can be understood as a form of selective storytelling and representation that can instrumentalize, appropriate and intervene with sites of cultural heritage, including monuments, memorials, street names, public iconography, (lived) heritage and archaeological sites, and museums, for the purpose of constructing an imaginary nation that is marked by grandeur, unity, and harmony, and that leaves no room for critical perspectives (e.g. Blokker 2022). Museums are important public institutions for knowledge dissemination and value representation and can become caught up in the workings of populist politics, as has been most striking in recent incidents of forced resignations of museum directors in e.g. Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia, and the establishment of new museums under populist rule in Turkey. This panel welcomes papers that deal with practices of populist heritage-making in Europe, that analyse impacts of populist politics on heritage sites and museums, and that consider counter-strategies of challenging and undoing populist heritage-making.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 26 July, 2024, -
Session 2 Friday 26 July, 2024, -