First Call for Sessions and Panels for the 3rd Biannual Conference: Montreal, 7-10th June 2016

Heritage is a powerful witness to mindsets and zeitgeist; it is commonly understood that it gives way to a better understanding of societies and even brings together communities. But how would this happen? Can heritage affect reality? What does it change?

The third ACHS Conference considers the manifestations, discourses, epistemologies, policies, and stakes of heritage—as a phenomenon, a symptom, an effect or a catalyst; as a tool of empowerment or leverage; as a physical or intangible restraint or kick-off; in communities, societies, or any material or mental environment. Subthemes range from gender-related issues to identity-making, mythologies of cultural diversity and the rethinking of heritage policies beyond the authorized heritage discourse.

The inaugural manifesto of the ACHS called for the building and the promotion of critical innovations and interventions in heritage while questioning the cultural and economic power relations that traditional understandings of heritage seem to underpin. This third Conference builds on the momentum of the previous conferences, held in Gothenburg, Sweden and in Canberra, Australia; it seeks to strengthen and broaden critical heritage studies as an inclusive area of theorisation, investigation and practice built from diverse geographical regions and disciplinary fields, such as public history, memory studies, museology, tourism studies, architecture and planning, urban studies, archaeology, geography, sociology, cultural studies, political science, anthropology, ethnology and artistic research.

Submissions to the 2016 ACHS Conference should bring innovative reflections and interdisciplinary methodologies or approaches to the critical enquiries about how and why heritage is, has been or could be made, used, studied, defined and managed, and with what effects, if any, on a society, a territory, an economy. Contributions might, for example, explore the reconstruction of narratives, the reconfiguration of social relations, knowledge production and cultural expressions, the transformation of the environment or the (de)valuation of the land. We particularly welcome papers that go beyond canon theories to interrogate discipline-based norms about heritage, and the assumptions that orient practice or decision-making. In this respect, this conference aims to continue important debates about heritage as a domain of politics and citizenship, a living environment, a source of identity and an assemblage of human-non-human relations.

For more information about the topics, roundtables and sessions, please visit the ACHS 2016 website

The deadline for the call for session is 1st July 2015
The deadline for the call for papers will be 1st November 2015.