Heritage Preservation in East Central Europe: Practices, Resources, Communities
The course is focused on practices of adaptive heritage reuse, including tangible and intangible aspects of heritage, in the broader region of East Central Europe and specifically in Ukraine. Methodologically, this course is grounded in Critical Heritage Studies, which approaches heritage as a dynamic web of relations, negotiations, and contestations, rooted in hierarchies of knowledge and access to resources. Understanding heritage as a process rather than a fixed reality opens the possibility of a non-hierarchical approach, with primary attention on people rather than objects in heritage lists. Every lecture offers methodological remarks, references to the most important literature in the field, as well as an analysis of concrete cases of heritage practice, be it everyday maintenance and care, repurposing, visiting, digitalization, neglect, ruination, and erasure. The lecturer refers to particular cases of adaptive heritage reuse and their challenges and achievements in a specific context of Ukraine and East Central Europe — the context determined by the experience of multicultural cohabitation in the past, radical violence and genocidal practices of heritage erasure and cultural property redistribution, enhanced and radical modernization and industrialization, imperial and socialist contexts, multiple changes of borders and political regimes, and participation in the global transfer of heritage practices and ideas in the situation of dynamic hierarchies of multiple centers and peripheries. The course is aimed at promoting a proactive and participatory approach to heritage, beyond the polarities of mere conservation and expert monopoly, on the one hand, and exploitative misuse or destruction of heritage for commercial gain, on the other.
The lectures offer practical tasks for students, such as working with objects from heritage collections, analyzing adaptive heritage reuse cases, and reflecting critically on personal experiences of interacting with heritage objects.
The course draws heavily on the collections of the Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History and on several projects in which the Center acted as a partner or lead, such as OpenHeritage, “Un/archiving Post/Industry”, and ReHERIT.
The course has three most important angles:
- Social dimension of heritage: importance of communities and networks, heritage objects as social focal points and place-making tools, shared and public nature of heritage, contested and conflicting aspects of heritage communities, embeddedness in social and economic inequalities
- Everyday heritage: practices of care and everyday maintenance, family and personal heritage
- Violence and ruptures vs continuity and tradition: contested and conflictual heritage, heritage under threat, heritage in the situations of war, occupation, and displacement.
The course is aimed at several audiences, such as students of humanities and social sciences, researchers with a special interest in the region, and practitioners in the spheres of heritage protection, digitalization, cultural industries, and urban planning and development.
