Research project
At Home Otherwise: Rethinking Heritage through Diversity
This project investigates diversifying and democratizing heritage through practices of “home-making”. We propose to research ‘home-making’ as a non-binary practice of combining memories of roots and routes, dwelling in the present, and desires for the future. Thus, home-making suggests a more complex conception of everyday heritagization, which we can confront with conditions of home- and heritage-making shaped by authorized heritage discourses.
- Contact
- Peter Pels
- Funding
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NWO Open Competition
Central Question
The 21st-century increase in studies of minoritized groups’ material culture and home-making was accompanied by the rise of studies of everyday ‘heritagization’. Scholarly contributions to diversifying heritage and a practical shift in governance towards policies of social inclusion notwithstanding, binary oppositions between ‘natives’ (and their heritage experts) and minoritized groups endure as categories and still structure heritage practices. But ‘home’ cannot be reduced to such an opposition: we remember earlier homes and travelling away from them; we make ‘home’ where we are with those memories, but also with future wishes en desires; and under conditions shaped by others. Looking at heritage through this more complex lens, we ask how it may help reforming and democratizing authorized heritage-talk and its associated practices.
Practitioners, Audience, and Curators
Three case-studies in this project study the confrontations and collaborations between minoritized groups’ everyday heritage and authoritative heritage institutions: semi-public (allotment) gardening by minoritized groups, museums aiming to displaying minoritized heritage (in the eyes of both makers and visitors), and the experiences of a new generation of ‘multicultural’ curators inside and outside authorized national institutions.
Collaborative Research and Citizen Science
This research project centers collaboration, both with partner institutions and citizens. We will work closely with Imagine IC, Reinwardt Academy for Cultural Heritage and others. Our social partners not only set our agenda but also help us find out which forms of collaboration may lead to more democratic heritage relationships in the future.