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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?