Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnography and practice-based research in Scotland's Northern Isles, this paper considers a performative praxis of co-curating maritime heritage-making as future assembling, deliberative value formation, elicitive of social learning for sustainable development in vulnerable environments.

Paper long abstract:

At the North Atlantic's crossroads, the Northern Isles were once central to international flows of people, goods and ideas. Now, their open economies, high youth out-migration, and ecosystems abraded by climate change indicate precarity. Here, maritime heritages track millennia of islands-situated responses to global dynamics. In museums, and households; submerged, and terrestrial, their construction tacks a course between "Authorised Heritage Discourse" (Smith 2006), and heritage-making "from below" (Robertson 2008).

This multi-media paper presents emergent research into how Orcadians and Shetlanders connect and/or disarticulate around this heritage-making, and proposes co-curation as a routeway for collaborative, "deliberative value formation" (Kenter et al 2016), elicitive of social learning for sustainable development. The epistemology, developed through ethnography, opens-up islander's conceptualisations of their maritime heritages, from early subsistence to the contested industries of marine-derived energies and cruise tourism. It informs an 'in-real-life' and 'in-virtual' co-curation with communities across both archipelagos. Once atomised objects; archives; practices; traditions, and sites are assembled and re-mobilised in new modalities: film; artworks, and digital modelling, embodying performative inclusivity and holism.

Through "shared authority" (Hutchison 2013), museum curators, boat-builders, mariners and artists, prototype co-curation as praxis. Getting "hands dirty" (Witcomb and Buckley 2013) together, through their process they track the value-formations that privilege selected aspects of Northern Isles' identity-work whilst others are 'forgotten'. Cultural expressions, lately instrumentalised in commodified "identikits" (Macdonald 1997), are re-considered as future-assembling resources. Questions emerge, including: can maritime heritage-making offer reveal way-markers for sustainable island-living, and is co-curation a useful track for communities choosing preferred futures?