Scaling Design Anthropology Approaches to Heritage Making: A Relational Model for Participatory Futures

Gertraud Koch, Rachel Charlotte Smith, Samantha Lutz

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Abstract

Inclusive engagement in collective memory making is a crucial challenge in contemporary societies. This paper introduces a relational approach to shaping and scaling socially inclusive memory practices as forms of global assemblages (Ong and Collier 2005).

Cultural heritage and participatory memory making have formed a central site for design anthropological engagement and experimentation, as part of the strong focus on participation, digitalisation and decolonisation between heritage institutions and everyday life (Smith 2022). Researchers engage professionals and communities in dialogic processes of curation to explore and co-design novel cultural (material, historical and digital) representations (Smith & Otto 2016; Koch 2021; Otto, Deger & Marcus 2022). They bring to the fore the potential of design anthropology as a transformative and decolonial practice towards: including both pasts-presents-futures, inclusive and multi-modal approaches to decolonial futures (Stuedahl et al. 2021; Kambunga et al. 2023; Chahine 2022).

Scaling up these approaches across scapes, flows, and spaces requires a heuristic framework to explore the transformative and participatory potentials of memory practices. As a basis for our argument, we propose a relational approach to Participatory Memory Making rooted in theories of social anthropology and critical heritage studies and developed as part of the interdisciplinary European research project POEM (www.poem-horizon.eu). It has the ability to examine the relational agency of groups, institutions, and memory modalities, i.e. socio-material arrangements, resonating with the multiplicity and diversity of social, political, and economic settings of memory practices, opening them up to design anthropological approaches that support the development of policies of inclusive futures.
Original languageEnglish
Publication date23 Jul 2024
Publication statusPublished - 23 Jul 2024
EventEuropean Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) 2024 - University of Barcelona , Barcelona , Spain
Duration: 23 Jul 202426 Jul 2024

Conference

ConferenceEuropean Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) 2024
LocationUniversity of Barcelona
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period23/07/202426/07/2024

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