Paper short abstract

Through two case studies—Israel’s recent militarised ‘visits’ to Jewish sites in South Lebanon and everyday memory work in the Jewish Quarter of Saïda—I demonstrate how the historical reality of sites and artifacts in the Levant escapes the nationalist frameworks within which they are imbricated.

Paper long abstract

Claims to Lebanese Jewish tangible heritage are multi-scalar, encompassing Israel’s assertion of worldwide Jewish history; the Lebanese state’s ostensible commitment to tolerance; and local contestations over ownership of sites and artefacts. Through two case studies—Israel’s recent militarised ‘visits’ to Jewish sites in South Lebanon and everyday memory work in the Jewish Quarter of Saïda—I demonstrate how the historical reality of ‘things Jewish’ in Lebanon escapes the nationalist frameworks within which it is imbricated.

In the fall of 2024, Israel intensified its military campaigns in Lebanon. Amidst bombardment of large segments of the country, Israel’s military escorted groups of ultra-Orthodox Jews to pray at religious sites across the south. Israel’s recent campaigns have included social scientists embedded within battalions, promoting sites (once revered by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike) as biblical and solely “Jewish,” thus promoting their usurpation within an ever-expanding Jewish state. Yet the continuing realities of the places and things that once sustained an active Jewish community in Lebanon demonstrate that Israel’s singular and totalising claim to Jewish life belies a historical reality in which Jewish heritage is entangled with the lives and histories not specifically ‘Jewish’. By examining both nationalist and local claims to multifaith sites, Jewish artefacts, and shared histories, I, ask: whom, including non-Jewish Lebanese and those in the Lebanese Jewish diaspora, speak for this heritage? And how have places and things central to Lebanese Jewish life, such as pilgrimage sites, historically dependant on networks of belonging that escape the confines and aims of the nation-state?

Paper short abstract

After Algeria’s independence war over a million European settlers departed. After WW II, Poland’s west absorbed parts of Germany. Comparing the afterlives of statues and architecture remaining from France and Germany draws on nostalgia, dissonant heritage, preservation and iconoclasm.

Paper long abstract

After the brutal Algerian War of Independence ended in 1962, more than a million former European settlers or “repatriates” (known in French colloquially as "Pieds-Noirs") departed Algeria en masse. The afterlives of their French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France, legally or clandestinely, as well as their French colonial architecture remaining in Algeria draw on colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm. After World War II, Poland’s borders shifted from east to west losing multiethnic eastern territories and in the west absorbing parts of Germany. Approximately 11 million ethnic German expellees (Vertriebene) went from Poland to post-war Germany’s Allied zones. In 2016, Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jensen co-edited a rare volume comparing these two groups, "Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France: Comparative Perspectives" (2016). Monuments and architecture offer visual records to engage with a dark past, whether that heritage is French colonial in Algeria or pre-war German. Although my focus is on contemporary Algeria (Slyomovics, "Monuments Decolonized," 2024), my paper compares current third-generation Algerian heritage practices with those in Poland as both countries continue to move and remove, vandalize and preserve their contested histories. I look at some recent cases in which expensive state and private sector projects in both nations affirm an appreciation and conscious appropriation of buildings and monuments related to colonial or pre-World War II heritage of Algeria and Poland respectively.

Paper short abstract

This paper explores the Statue of a Girl of Peace as a material site where heritage, memory, and power intersect. It examines how commemorative forms stabilise narratives of suffering while shaping moral claims and public meaning across local and diasporic contexts.

Paper long abstract

This proposal examines the heritage of comfort women—victims of sexual slavery by the Imperial Army of Japan during the Asia–Pacific War—through the Statue of a Girl of Peace as a material site where memory, authority, and public meaning are actively produced across national and diasporic contexts. While widely framed as an emblem of justice and remembrance, the statue also operates as a mechanism through which particular narratives of suffering are stabilised, circulated, and institutionalised.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Seoul, Toronto, and Berlin, this study investigates how the statue and its replicas are situated within activist, institutional, and community settings, and how survivor testimonies, political agendas, and moral claims converge around these monuments. Through visual documentation and semiotic analysis, I trace how lived experiences are translated into authorised forms of heritage, often privileging singular narratives of victimhood while marginalising more complex or ambivalent memories.

By attending to the statues’ spatial placement and embodied encounters, the proposed paper conceptualises heritage-making as a performative process that produces recognition while simultaneously narrowing interpretive possibilities. I argue that the Statue of of a Girl of Peace exemplifies how commemorative materialities can function both as sites of resistance and as instruments of symbolic governance, reinforcing polarised public discourse and foreclosing alternative engagements with the past.

The paper reflects on the role of critical heritage studies in examining heritage-making as a relational process and the involvement of diverse actors in shaping commemorative practices across local, and diasporic contexts.

Paper short abstract

Examining Baram/Birʿam heritage landscape in Israel/Palestine, this study critiques hegemonic Zionist heritage narratives and explores how diverse communities perform and negotiate silenced histories within a layered landscape, highlighting the potential of contested sites for inclusive heritage.

Paper long abstract

Zionist historiography has long framed Jewish history as a linear and symbolic progression from biblical antiquity to the modern Zionist national project, producing a hegemonic narrative that underpins Israel’s national heritage landscape. Emerging in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe, this secular and Eurocentric interpretation has shaped official memory practices while marginalizing alternative historical trajectories, including those of Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Despite Israel’s cultural and historical diversity, national heritage policies continue to overwhelmingly privilege Zionist narratives, resulting in the systematic underrepresentation of non-hegemonic pasts in public space and contributing to ongoing social and cultural exclusion.

The research focuses on Baram/Birʿam National Park near the Israeli–Lebanese border, a site characterized by layered and competing histories. Officially, the park foregrounds archaeological remains of a Talmudic-era synagogue that reinforce a Zionist narrative of Jewish continuity. At the same time, the landscape contains unmarked Jewish pilgrimage sites associated with the burial of saints—often linked to Mizrahi religious traditions—as well as the remains of the depopulated Maronite village of Birʿam, including an active church, cemetery, and surviving structures. Together, these elements produce a heritage landscape shaped by intersecting religious, national, ethnic, and political identities. Through fieldwork with communities who maintain social, religious, and historical ties to Baram/Birʿam yet remain unrepresented in its official narrative, this study examines multiple heritage performances and their negotiation within a single site. In doing so, it highlights the potential of contested heritage landscapes to challenge dominant historical narratives and open possibilities for more inclusive heritage practices in Israel/Palestine.

Paper short abstract

​​The paper conceptualises the urgent need to critically examine the rampant desecration of Dr. Ambedkar's statuary as a form of art historical methodology that mediates memory and materiality in a polarised India.

Paper long abstract

This paper foregrounds the desecration of Dr. Ambedkar’s statuary as a method to critically think about anti-caste aesthetic history and the discipline's broader understanding of memory and materiality. Drawing from my research on the widespread presence of various forms of anti-caste iconography in India, I posit desecration as not just a legal crime but as a mimetic everyday practice wherein the anticipation of active destruction activates a political-temporal relay. The various iterations of desecration self-defeatingly underscore how anti-caste sculpturalism is not about the recreation of a statue but rather about the recreation of its ruins. Community built statues in this sense evidence the long and granular history of caste contestation across the breadth of the nation since the 1980s. These artisanal and subversive statues embody a unique style, insurgent design and gestural sensibility that is unorthodox and vernacular. A majority of these sartorial statues are often consciously crafted with an iron cage due to the omnipresent fear of the rampant and punitive desecration/s. This sensory-spatial dialectic of materiality and memorialisation captures land disputes, juridical battles, artistic claims, all at once in an increasingly polarised right wing nation. The desecrating practice is also about the heterogeneous, efficacious and isomorphic visual formations of Ambedkar. There currently exists no systematic reportage or archive on the virulent, quotidian and multivalent forms of desecration. The paper hence asks what new theoretical possibilities of anti-caste art history emerge when weaponised absence, ephemeral ruination, precarious narratives and minoritarian sentiments together mobilise cultural politics.

Paper short abstract

White asparagus is a spring delicacy claimed as food heritage across Germany. Asparagus Queens and Supermale asparagus plants reify those claims via phallocentric, white, regional imaginaries. Fairytale-like, they turn exploitation into a shared cultural good. Can they be unsettled from within?

Paper long abstract

Spring in Germany arrives in the shape of white asparagus, a delicacy celebrated across the country with unlikely religiosity. Two lead characters are central to German asparagus economies: regionally crowned asparagus queens and internationally traded supermale asparagus plants. We show how they make consumable ideas of phallocentric traditionalism paired with hegemonic whiteness and imagined regionality.

Asparagus queens are young women promoting asparagus regions through their public performances of carefully managed femininity. The sexualised bodies of those young women make tradition socially legible and emotionally compelling. “Supermales” are masculinized mutations of the asparagus plant that stand for resistance to illnesses and labour-efficiency, stronger, and often “whiter” than the rest. Harvested by migrant farmworkers, the spears of those lab-bred supermales are claimed as regional food heritage.

As asparagus queens and supermales reify social orders and domesticate agro-capitalism as regional belongings across Germany, they also feed on the identities of others, systematically erasing them from the picture: migrant food workers, who carry the heaviest burden in asparagus production labouring under harsh conditions. Fairytale-like, both lead characters transform multiple exploitations into a shared cultural good.

Our project wants to unsettle the fixedness of heritage claims from within, asking how queens and supermales may also lift up a critical mirror to the traditions they are meant to serve - as provocateurs? In a short, experimental film we will use feminist visual practice to open spaces of recognition, complicity, and critique, reworking heritage as a social relation that can be laughed at, questioned, and reimagined collectively.

Paper short abstract

Heritage development in Jordan casts hospitality as consumable heritage, yet efforts to commodify practices like offering Arabic coffee meet resistance. This paper shows how refusals to consume hospitality expose the alienation heritage-making produces and its limits as political control.

Paper long abstract

“Hospitality in Jordan is in the stones”; “hospitality is engrained in Jordanian culture”; Jordanians are by nature very hospitable people”; sentences like these line the brochures promoting the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as a touristic destination. They are echoed in the signage guiding visitors around heritage sites in the country. The importance of hospitality in Jordanian culture is put forward as an undeniable fact and serves as a cornerstone in the development of the tourism and heritage industry in the country. But the way development projects have tried to develop hospitality practices as heritage has been resisted by many Jordanians. This is exemplified in the struggle of past USAID projects to integrate coffee rituals in tourism packages as heritage experiences. Arabic coffee, my interlocutors stressed to me, is sacred, it is not for sale; just as their hospitality is not.

Building on Andrew Shryock’s analysis of how “authentic” (asli) hospitality is displaced into the past to shield it from tourism (2004, 2012), this paper asks what the resistance against the integration of hospitality into heritage can tell us about the role of heritage as a political tool. Through ethnographic attention to the material consumption of culture as heritage (coffee, construction of spaces of hospitality, and curated encounters), I explore how claims of control (saytara) over hospitality generate experiences of alienation. I argue that hospitality’s refusal to be “digested” as heritage exposes the limits of heritage-making as a technique of political control.

Paper short abstract

What is Japanese food？Why do people eat it? Across restaurants in London and Cairo, we explore the experiences of producing and consuming Japanese food. We explore how cuisines are constructed and contested through questions of morality, class, and global power relations in postcolonial contexts.

Paper long abstract

This paired ethnography explores how Japanese cuisine becomes a ‘consumed belonging’ through which questions of morality, class, and global power relations are contested across classed postcolonial contexts. Drawing on comparative ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London and Cairo, alongside analyses of menus, restaurant design, table interactions, and online reviews, we trace how authenticity, purity, and cultural authority are produced before, during, and after the meal. In London, diners frequently ask staff, “Is this real Japanese food?” signalling their pursuit of an “authentic” experience of Japan. The fact that the restaurant is vegan also means that this pursuit is entangled with other forms of ethical consumption. We examine how Japan becomes staged as a heritage object that must be authenticated, with staff serving as gatekeepers of this imagined essence. Drawing on Said’s Orientalism, we explore how this desire for a pure Japan reflects a classed form of cultural authority, through which the Global North produces Japan as a coherent and morally legible object of consumption. In an upscale Japanese restaurant in Cairo, Japanese cuisine becomes a marker of elite distinction and cosmopolitan aspiration, where authenticity is defined by curated ingredients, refined service, and high prices. Ethical claims are less explicitly articulated, and access to “real” Japanese food serves as a status symbol. Across both sites, purity and authenticity are not inherent but performed, classed practices embedded in the afterlives of colonial domination. Food becomes a contested heritage object through which consumers ingest and reproduce global inequalities, even under ethical and cosmopolitan frameworks.

Paper short abstract

This paper will use thick description to examine the ‘double pour ritual’ of a pint of Draught Guinness. It will unpack the everyday ‘lore’ that surrounds the ritual and how that ritual offers a boundary marker of a national identity, consumed within the idea of the Irish pub.

Paper long abstract

In an apparently increasingly polarised world, taking an anthropological approach to the everyday, grounded, nature of nationalism is important. This paper looks at the strange story of a ritual of mass consumption, central to a national identity, underpinned by ideas of authenticity and heritage, that is facilitated by a multinational company on a global scale. There are few, if any, brands so closely associated with an ethno-national identity than the brand of Guinness is with Irishness. My argument will take an ethnographic piece of thick description to examine what I will call the ‘double pour ritual’ of a pint of Draught Guinness. It will examine the everyday ‘lore’ that surrounds the ritual, the demarcation of Irishness, how the ritual is constructed in the market place, and consumed within the idea of the Irish ‘heritage’ pub. Despite the global nature of this ritual performance of Irishness, especially on St Patrick's Day, and the almost symbiotic relationship with the Irish State, the history or ‘heritage’ or the ‘tradition’ reveals much about the forces of capitalist consumption. The Guinness family were a Protestant, landed family that favoured Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom. The brand is owned by Diageo, a multi-national company based in London, which in 2024 had a global net profit of $2.5 billion. In addition, the stout beer does not remain the same product over time. This ritual suggests the powerful performative nature of grounded nationalism, ideas of historical continuity and their relation to the consumption of national identity.

Paper short abstract

In my paper, I conduct an object biography of a late 20th-century circumcision logbook from Tetouan (Morocco), which is now housed at Spain’s first public Jewish museum, to elucidate the continuing deracination of Sephardi histories from those of their Muslim neighbors in North Africa.

Paper long abstract

In my paper, I conduct an object biography of one record - the libro registro (circumcision logbook) of Rabbi Haserfaty, who served the Jewish communities of Teṭwān from the end of 20th century and well into the first decades of the Spanish Protectorate in northern Morocco. This logbook has been housed at the Museo Sefardí of Toledo, Spain’s first public Jewish museum, for decades following its deposit and subsequent sale to the Museo by one of Haserfaty's family members. By examining the social life of this unique record of Teṭwānī life, I am able to elucidate two interrelated processes: first, the mechanisms through which selective narration of Spain’s loss and recuperation of Sephardi memory occurs; and second, the consequences of this partial recuperation of Sephardi memory for how we understand Sephardi life post-expulsion. The most significant consequence I highlight in this paper is the continuing deracination of Sephardi histories from those of their neighbors in North Africa (where the logbook was created). In particular, I demonstrate how the libro registro, which reveals the intertwining of Jewish and non-Jewish life through shared patterns of social stratification, becomes flattened as a record through its removal from its birthplace, reappraisal as a record of Jewish life exclusively, and finally, transformation into a static symbol of Sephardi Jewish ritual life in the Museo Sefardí’s permanent collection.

Paper short abstract

Newton Enslaved Burial Ground is mobilised as a national heritage project and a site of moral repair. Based on fieldwork with museum and community actors, I analyse how material damage during development polarised claims over ownership, care, and belonging.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how “consumed belongings” polarise publics when heritage is staged as both moral repair and institutional project. The case is the Newton Burial Ground in Barbados, a burial site of enslaved people that became a focal point of heritage-making: archaeological research and museum involvement established it as an authoritative site of memory, while construction work for a monument and research centre have reactivated debates about ownership, care, and historical accountability.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with actors connected to the Barbados Museum & Historical Society, heritage practitioners, and community interlocutors, I analyse how the burial ground is made into a non-negotiable public good—yet is simultaneously contested through moral evaluations and competing narratives of legitimacy. A key moment of polarisation emerged when construction work reportedly damaged the edge of the site, producing a rupture between promises of commemoration and experiences of renewed violation. In response, different actors mobilised distinct registers: legal/institutional responsibility, spiritual and ancestral claims, nationalist narratives of development, and critiques of museum authority as colonial residue.

I argue that the burial ground operates as a “sticky” (Ahmed 2004) materiality where labour, loss, and belonging are continuously (in)digested: the site is asked to carry reconciliation, tourism potential, research value, and political symbolism at once. By tracing how damage, repair, and publicity circulate, the paper shows how heritage projects can intensify polarisation while also opening fragile possibilities for re-negotiating care and accountability.

Paper short abstract

The paper analyzes how First World War cemeteries in the Kaliningrad Region become contested heritage. Based on a survey and expert interviews, this paper demonstrates how these sites polarize notions of ownership, belonging, and responsibility in a region shaped by layered histories.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the dynamics of First World War funerary heritage in Russia's Kaliningrad Region, a territory with complex history. The German military cemeteries and memorials in the area are not mere relics; they are actively engaged and contested within contemporary heritage discussions. Based on a quantitative survey of local residents and in-depth interviews with heritage professionals, this study investigates how these sites are utilized in public narratives of identity and historical responsibility.

Results indicate that cemeteries serve as objects of care, tourism resources, geopolitical symbols, and sometimes as unwanted inheritances. For some residents, they are a valued part of the region's multicultural landscape, while for others, they represent domination and foreignness, raising questions about whose past is being preserved. Experts highlight the gap between professional heritage preservation principles and the moral and political negotiations necessary to maintain sites that many do not consider "their own."

By tracing these dynamics, the paper shows how claims over funerary heritage polarize community perspectives while being framed as essential obligations of a civilized society. This study emphasizes that the funerary landscapes of the Great War in Kaliningrad are continuously shaped and contested through processes of consumption, negotiation, and resistance.

Paper short abstract

In UK folk festivals revival, Morris dancing’s black-painted faces sparked debates over tradition, diversity, and belonging. Fieldwork revealed tensions between preserving heritage, engaging BIPOC awareness, and navigating “white folks” perceptions amid changing social and funding contexts.

Paper long abstract

Folk festivals in the UK, featuring dancing, masks, and processions of mythical characters, offer a lens to examine the contested space of revived ‘folk’ as local and territorial identity. Contemporary folk revivals navigate responding to multicultural and multi-ethnic transformations and sensibilities while preserving elements of heritage sometimes deemed or misperceived as entangled with reactionary or colonial imaginaries (Boyes 1993, Cornish 2016, Irvine 2018). A prominent example is black-painted faces in traditional Morris dancing, practiced widely across the UK, but occasionally stirring controversy, with critics arguing that blackened faces reproduce blackface as the racialised practice of minstrelsy. Organisers and dancers have responded in varied ways: some emphasised historical origins, explaining the use of burnt straw or the need by workers to conceal identities during acts associated with peddling; others modified the practice with alternative face paints, costume changes or by actively promoting the inclusion of Black performers. Drawing on fieldwork at two UK folk festivals, I examine how such sites are contested as “white folks things,” highlighting a tension between organisers engaging with Black awareness and BIPOC discourse and persistent demographic patterns reflecting class and geographic divides, in relation to shifting diversity requirements associated with community and public funding policies. These case studies situate the blackface debate within broader debates over tradition, belonging, and cultural change. Fieldwork reveals that UK folk revival sites have been enacting sustained efforts to enhance diversity, while negotiating the performative boundedness of folk, still affected by situated geographies, discourses, and social networks.