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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines three research projects that used Visual Research Methodologies (VRM) to understand emotional engagement and sense of place in urban Australia. It argues that VRM allow the recording and sharing of micro interactions with ‘ordinary’ heritage often obscured by traditional methods.

Paper long abstract:

Community-driven involvement in heritage practice has been advocated through a number of key texts and case studies, chronicling not only its successes, but also the pitfalls and limitations of grass-roots participation. However, according to Beilin (2005), participatory approaches provide a way of recognising the ‘everyday’ through which most social worlds are created and sustained. This ‘everyday’ is constituted through engagement with place, and there is a long history of research into the cultural production of meaningful places in a variety of disciplines. However, new questions are being asked about the relationship between technical knowledge, and historical and heritage expertise, and how social and popular media forms be harnessed to find new ways of engaging communities around heritage places and issues. Such engagement is cognitive, emotional and behavioural (Ponzetti 2003 in Smith 2017) and multi-sensory (Crang and Toila-Kelly 2010) which raises issues related to the ability of traditional ‘talk only’ methodologies to understand the complexities of these engagements (Middleton 2010).

This paper critically examines three recent research projects that have used Visual Research Methodologies (VRM) to understand emotional engagement and sense of place. It argues that VRM provides a way of recording and sharing the micro interactions with ‘ordinary’ heritage places that are often obscured by traditional methodologies. As such VRM enhance our understand of the interrelationships between place, heritage, and identity, and contributes to contemporary debates about ideas of surface and depth in our affective attachment to place.